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License DMCA My guest today is Maya Schenwar, Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better , and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States . Joan Brunwasser: Welcome back to OpEdNews, Maya. We last spoke back in January, 2015. Now, I'd like to discuss your recent piece: Death Penalty for Heroin Dealers? More Proof the Drug War Is Not Over . Who thought the drug war was over in the first place and why? - Advertisement - Maya Schenwar: There has been a shift in mainstream politics toward condemning the drug war, and for good reason. It has done nothing to stem drug misuse, and meanwhile it has resulted in the criminalization and incarceration of millions of people, overwhelmingly Black and Brown people. With countless studies demonstrating its "failure" (I put this in quotes because I don't think the drug war was actually devised to help people in the first place), politicians who defend it end up looking pretty bad. So the current line is to say it's in the past, and that we have a new approach to drugs going forward. The Obama administration, many state governments, and even conservative politicians (including the "Right on Crime" crowd) have said that we need to leave behind the old war on drugs. In February, Eric Holder said the drug war is "over," and Obama increasingly talks about treating drug-related issues as "public health problems" instead of criminal problems. JB: How does that change anything: the disproportionate numbers of minority members locked up for possession, more single moms incarcerated for the same, families split up and minors left with no parent at home? Are they, then, opening the prison gates and saying, "We were wrong. This was all a big mistake; it didn't work and we diverted and wasted billions of dollars that could have been used to good purpose. And we ruined your lives for nothing. Oops. Sorry."? MS: No, no one is opening the prison gates, unfortunately! There are some limited steps being taken toward scaling back drug-war-related incarceration. For example, Obama has issued hundreds of commutations to people serving super-long drug sentences. Some states have taken steps to reduce some very low-level drug offenses to misdemeanors instead of felonies, which means people are a lot less likely to be incarcerated for them. (California's Proposition 47 is an example of this, although the emphasis on "low-level offenses" has actually entrenched the idea that people should be severely punished for "higher-level offenses.) - Advertisement - Obviously, in a number of states, marijuana is being decriminalized, and some are legalizing it. However, that doesn't mean there are no longer marijuana arrests -- in fact, an ACLU study released recently showed there were more marijuana possession arrests last year than arrests for all violent crimes. The study also showed that Black people are still disproportionately arrested in far greater numbers than white people, despite using marijuana at about the same rate as white people. JB: How do we understand this, Maya? Beyond being convinced that the whole penal system is seriously screwed up, what's the point of increased marijuana arrests? Is this a last gasp effort or at least partly to fill up jail cells and local or private prison coffers? MS: There wasn't an increase in marijuana arrests overall last year; there was a decrease. But obviously it was a small decrease, given that there was a larger number of possession arrests than all violent crime arrests. I don't think it's about filling private prison coffers. Ultimately, prisons are expensive for states, and I don't actually see money as a primary motivator to incarcerate people. Until we challenge criminality itself -- and challenge the white supremacy that underlies the US's version of criminality -- we won't be done with large-scale incarceration. We have to understand incarceration by looking at how people are being labeled as disposable and as "dangerous," and how those things are racialized. Whether it's marijuana possession or something else, there will always be a convenient "crime" with which to charge Black and Brown people unless white supremacy itself is confronted. We also have to think about ableism, transmisogyny, patriarchy, economic injustice, capitalism -- really confronting the structures that make it possible for our society to lock millions of people in cages. If we look at the drug war through this lens, we understand that's it's not some stand-alone entity; it's one tool deployed by a larger power structure that continually targets marginalized people in order to keep itself going. JB: Good point. Does the fact that the penal dysfunction is part of a larger overarching dysfunction make it easier or harder to improve it? And what's ableism? I don't know that I'm familiar with that term. MS: I think the fact that it's part of an overarching structural problem means that it can't really been improved, per se -- it really has to be uprooted. I wouldn't say that can happen extremely easily; it's more a goal to move toward while making incremental changes. Ableism is the structural oppression against and devaluation of people with disabilities. One of the ways it plays out in relation to prison is the extremely high level of incarceration of people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. 'Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better' by Maya Schenwar(image by Berrett-Koehler Publishers) License DMCA JB: Quite true. I believe much of that shift occurred when President Reagan "reallocated" resources, closing many state mental hospitals and dumping the patients onto the streets and the unprepared public. And we've been paying the price, one way or another, ever since. What haven't we talked about yet? MS: There's of course much more to talk about, but we have to end things somewhere, right? One thing I'd caution people against is assuming that the automatic alternative to incarceration for people convicted of drug offenses should be drug treatment. First of all, most people arrested for drug offenses aren't dependent on drugs (most people who use drugs are not dependent on them); there are safe ways to use drugs and we have to challenge laws that stigmatize their use. | 0 |
Tuesday 22 November 2016 by Mark Maguire Kanye West rushed to hospital with suspected ‘dislocated ego’
Rap ‘legend’ Kanye West is this evening undergoing emergency treatment for a suspected dislocated ego, suffered while talking to himself in the mirror.
The self-loving 39-year-old was rushed to hospital after a member of his entourage noticed worrying signs that the usually conceited front-man was not his normal vanity-obsessed self.
They told reporters, “One minute everything seemed fine, and he was swaggering around the place looking down his nose at all the rest of us, like normal.
“Then, what seemed like just seconds later, he was stood at the side of the room, shoulders slumped, displaying some frankly worrying signs of genuine humility.
“I asked him he was OK, but all he could say was, ‘The Life of Pablo – that album is just a load of old self-indulgent horseshit, isn’t it?’. I’m not afraid to admit that at that moment, I was terrified.”
“It soon became a race to see how quickly we could reach the emergency services and get him some treatment before the ego suffered permanent damage.”
The star’s support staff reacted swiftly, with an on-site emergency first-aider ensuring Kanye received some much needed mouth-to-ear ego stroking.
One witness explained, “I think that first-aid saved his ego to be honest – they just seemed to instinctively know how to react, and the right thing to say. Thankfully the paramedics arrived after just a few minutes.
“They brought all this incredible equipment and spent about fifteen minutes applying emergency ego-massage, while the rest of us just looked on in horror.
“Fortunately they managed to stabilise him so that they could get him to the hospital, but they continued the ego-massage as they loaded him into the ambulance.
“The last thing I heard them say was, ‘You’re amazing Kanye, and The College Dropout is the best album of the last twenty years, and that’s absolutely all down to you, and you alone’.”
Kanye was rushed to a specialist ‘Ego Hospital’ in Beverly Hills and underwent a complex eight-hour surgery to re-locate the ego, which Doctors have declared a complete success.
A hospital spokesperson confirmed that his recuperation could take up to eight weeks, but that he would likely make a full recovery and should return to his previous levels of brazen egotism. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own? | 0 |
Previous Next 115 Million Americans Killed In 30 Minutes
It is called the SS-18, the “Satan” for short. As Obama has gutted military preparedness, Putin has busily been doing the opposite. The Russian military is capable of wiping our large swaths of this country in less than an afternoon.
The title of this piece is 115 million Americans killed in 30 minutes. Thirty minutes is the approximate time that an SS-18, launched from inside Russia, would reach the Eastern Seaboard, where 5 of these missiles would destroy the entire east coast in which 115 million Americans would perish with scarcely a trace. The casualty figures come from Paul Craig Roberts.
When will the bulk of Americans realize that they have been sold out under a treasonous chief executive? You will scarcely believe your eyes and ears in the following report as you are about to learn that we are Russia’s mercy.
The stunning details are in the following video. DOES ANYONE THINK THAT HILLARY’S “NO-FLY ZONE” IN SYRIA, IS STILL A GOOD IDEA? | 0 |
MASONVILLE, Iowa — Lavern Kelchen stood in the back of a church hall in jeans and a shirt, tapped his left index finger on his leg and placed the winning bid on a farm here in eastern Iowa. It marked the seventh auction he had attended in the last five years and, with a bid of $9, 000 an acre, his first win. “I’m just getting a really good start,” said Mr. Kelchen, 51, who farms 2, 400 acres near Edgewood, Iowa. “I plan to go as long as I possibly can. ” For farmers like Mr. Kelchen, whose work is a lifestyle, retirement seems more like a sentence than a prize. “The first two days I’d probably be all right,” he said. “But after that, I’d be going haywire. ” Mark Francois, 64, a farmer who also bid on the farm, echoed that sentiment. “I can only play so much golf,” he said, seated beside his son. “I don’t look forward to retirement. I look forward to doing fieldwork. ” Even Dean Vaske, 52, the farmer whose late parents’ land was being auctioned off, agreed. “I’m glad retirement is far away,” he said. “I love what I do, so why would I want to quit?” Farmers tend to work longer than most Americans, and recent statistics show they are farming even later in life, driven by work that is their identity, aided by technology that lightens its physical toll, and spurred by solid profits off record yields. According to the Department of Agriculture’s latest census, conducted in 2012, the average age of principal farm operators in the United States is 58, up from 50. 5 in 1982. One third are at least 65, the traditional retirement age, and 12 percent are 75 or older. Ask baby boomer farmers here how they are planning for retirement and the likely answer is: They are not. Fifteen percent of Iowa farmers never intend to retire, according to a 2014 farm poll by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach and the state agriculture department. Another 20 percent said they plan to eventually continuing to provide some managerial control or labor to their farms. Many do not have a formal retirement fund. The land, they say, is their 401( k). The same fierce independence that drew them to farming characterizes their retirement approach: free of pensions, unions and experts, just how they like it. “We’re on our own,” Mr. Francois said. “All you have to do is ask for advice, but we don’t. ” Only 49 percent of Iowa farmers have identified a successor to eventually run their farms, according to the 2014 farm poll. Many avoid the topic because they equate retirement with mortality. They are quick to relay stories of farmers who died shortly after retiring — presumably, they imply, because of a loss of purpose. Even those who have selected a successor are loath to pick a retirement date and actively prepare for it. It took a tornado for Dean Vaske’s father, Art, to retire and move into town. He had been milking cows twice a day until his early 70s. Then the tornado wiped out another son’s farm buildings, prompting Art to invite that son to move onto his farm. Looking back, Dean Vaske said, the transition was smooth. “We couldn’t have planned it much better,” he said. Farmers here assume retirement will work itself out. “If everyone’s raised right, the next generation will take care of us when we get to the point that we can’t farm ourselves,” said Jim Hogan, 66, a farmer from Monticello, Iowa, whose father never retired. Mr. Hogan has two sons who farm with him and “no idea” how he will structure his retirement income when he scales back from daily operations. Yet he admits that his father’s lack of succession planning (the farm was ultimately left in the control of Mr. Hogan’s mother when his father died) was not ideal, limiting what Mr. Hogan and his brothers can now do with the land, which is still owned by his mother in a trust controlled by a law firm. David W. Baker, a farm transition specialist from Iowa State Extension and Outreach, said that when he counsels families to help them begin discussing retirement, 90 percent of his meetings bring someone to tears. “There are strong feelings about the farm, about what grandpa and grandma did, about my son or daughter having no interest in my farm,” Mr. Baker said. Amanda Van Steenwyk, who leads a program for the Iowa Farm Bureau, said the scenario can be devastating. “From the lack of planning, the farm will get split up — or even worse, the family will get split up,” she said. A farmer’s retirement is determined by whether an adult child is involved in the operation. This is the case for 31 percent of Iowa farmers, according to the farm poll, which means they will typically sell or rent the land to their farming child upon retirement. Arriving at an equitable arrangement for the nonfarming children can be a challenge, experts say. Meanwhile, there is pressure on the child operating the family farm, said Matt Hein, 61, a Monticello farmer. “You’re actually working with your father’s retirement plan,” he said. “You to go to bed at night thinking, ‘That’s a retirement plan. ’” For Jack Kintzle, 73, a retired farmer near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the fact that his children chose not to farm made him wistful at first, but ultimately simplified his retirement equation. “It helped me make a cleaner break,” he said. Now Mr. Kintzle lives off his 700 acres. Some retired farmers leasing their land and splitting the crop between owner and operator. Others set up a lease in which another operator pays a fixed price per acre to work the land and keep all of its income. Last year’s average rate was $235 per acre, according to Iowa State data. But farmers are in no rush, guided by a reversal of conventional wisdom on retirement. While many Americans fear they could work themselves to death, farmers see their livelihood as their lifeline. Success does not allow them to quit earlier, it prods them to keep going. And they don’t envy retirees — they feel sorry for them. “It’s sad when people have a countdown to retirement,” Mr. Francois said. “They obviously don’t love their job. My friend who worked at the Postal Service had it right down to the hours till he could quit. Now he spends a lot of time just reading. He doesn’t get outside as much. I don’t think he even looks good. ” | 1 |
Edmondo Burr in Sci/Environment // 0 Comments Yesterday the sun erupted with a huge solar flare sending streams of particles bombarding towards Earth.
A solar storm can wreak havoc on electricity power lines and technologies that rely on satellites.
People are warned to prepare for the worst in coming days.
The Daily Express reports:
Solar storms can affect technology here on Earth as the radiation thrown at our planet heat the outer atmosphere, resulting in it expanding.
As a result, satellite communications struggle to penetrate the atmosphere, essentially blocking communications which could lead to a lack of GPS navigation, mobile phone signal and satellite TV such as Sky.
Furthermore, higher currents in the magnetosphere – the Earth’s magnetic field – could result in a surge of electricity in power lines, which can blow out electrical transformers and power stations leading to a temporary loss of electricity in a region – although this usually only occurs in areas that are in high altitude.
The solar storm is predicted to carry on until October 27 and officials are telling citizens to prepare for the worst.
The US Space Weather Prediction Center said: “Voltage corrections may be required, false alarms triggered on some protection devices.
“Drag may increase on low-Earth-orbit satellites, and corrections may be needed for orientation problems”.
The storm was originally described as a “serious” G3 level storm, although it was later downgraded to a G2.
The UK Met Office said: “Elevated solar winds are expected throughout the period, with G1-G2 minor to moderate geomagnetic storms forecast.” Greenland
However, on the plus side, solar storms can lead to the Northern Lights being visible.
As the magnetosphere gets bombarded by solar winds, stunning blue lights can appear over the upper reaches of the Northern hemisphere and the lower parts of the southern hemisphere. | 0 |
First Civilians From Surrounding Towns Arrive in Camps
Aid agencies which have been trying to prepare for the huge influx of displaced persons from the city of Mosul are reporting the first arrivals of civilians who fled the surrounding towns , most arriving on foot, and many with nothing more than the clothing on their backs.
The agencies are playing up the months of preparation they engaged in, but exactly how they will cope with what could easily be a million new refugees with very little assistance from either the Iraqi government or from the US-led coalition, is still up in the air.
The UN has reported six camps are ready to accept about 50,000 people, and 11 more camps are in the process of being readied. At the same time, the UN has warned that they don’t have the funding to support all of these refugees over the long run, and the Mosul battle looks to very much be the long run.
Iraq has warned civilians in Mosul against fleeing from the city, a warning that came after the US announced they intend to conduct air strikes against fleeing ISIS fighters. It’s unclear how many civilians will be able to “stay put” as they were ordered, but the expectations of an intense urban battle are likely to drive many to flee while they still can. | 0 |
.@SenatorCollins says Senate ”starting from scratch” on health care bill: ”We will come up with a whole new, fresh approach.” #ThisWeek pic. twitter. Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Susan Collins ( ) said the Senate is going to start over with health care. Collins said, “The House bill is not going to come before us. The Senate is starting from scratch. We’re going to draft our own bill and I’m convinced that we’re going to take the time to do it right. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
WUHAN, China — Russell Abney raised two children on solar power. The Georgia Tech graduate worked for the last decade in Perrysburg, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, pulling a good salary as an equipment engineer for the largest American maker. On the other side of the world, Gao Song boasted his own solar success story. A former organic fruit retailer who lives in the dusty Chinese city of Wuhan, he installed solar panels on his roof four years ago and found it so lucrative that he went into business installing them for others. By last summer, he and a team of 50 employees were installing systems on nearly 100 roofs a month. Then China shook the global solar business — and transformed both their lives. “A small vibration back in China,” said Frank Haugwitz, a longtime solar industry consultant in Beijing, “can cause an avalanche in prices around the world. ” Late last summer, Chinese officials began publicly toying with slashing the subsidies they offer domestic buyers. Mr. Gao’s business dried up, and he laid off half his workers. “I have been working hard and was just off to a good start,” he said. “Now I have to start over. ” China’s makers cut their prices by more than a quarter to compensate, sending global prices plummeting. Western companies found themselves unable to compete, and cut jobs from Germany to Michigan to Texas and points beyond. Those points included Perrysburg — where Mr. Abney and about 450 other employees suddenly found themselves out of work. “Within just a few months, it all came crashing down,” Mr. Abney said. “It’s like a death in the family. People feel awkward talking about it. ” President Trump, who pressed President Xi Jinping of China on trade and other issues this week when they met at in Palm Beach, Fla. has vowed to end what he calls China’s unfair business practices. Much of his oratory has involved smokestack industries like steel — industries in which the jobs were already disappearing even before the rise of China. But economists and business groups warn that China’s industrial ambitions have entered a new, phase. With its deep government pockets, growing technical sophistication and a comprehensive plan to free itself from dependence on foreign companies, China aims to become dominant in industries of the future like renewable energy, big data and cars. With solar, it has already happened. China is now home to of the world’s capacity. The efficiency with which its products convert sunlight into electricity is increasingly close to that of panels made by American, German and South Korean companies. Because China also buys half of the world’s new solar panels, it now effectively controls the market. For much of the past century, the ups and downs of the American economy could spell the difference between employment or poverty for people like Chilean copper miners and Malaysian rubber farmers. Now China’s policy shifts and business decisions can have the same kind of global impact once wielded by power brokers in Washington, New York and Detroit. The story of China’s rise in solar panels illustrates the profound difficulties the country presents to Mr. Trump, or to any American president. Its size and economy give it the ability to redefine industries almost on a dime. Its pursuit of dominance in crucial industries presents a direct challenge to countries where leaders generally leave business decisions to the businesses themselves. Already, China is the world’s largest maker and buyer of steel, cars and smartphones. While it does not necessarily dominate those industries, its government ministries are moving to replicate that success with robots, chips and software — just as in solar. Chinese panel makers “have the capital, they have the technology, they have the scale,” said Ocean Yuan, the chief executive of Grape Solar, a distributor of solar panels based in Eugene, Ore. Of American rivals, he said, “they will crush them. ” Before he became one of the solar industry’s most powerful players, Liu Hanyuan raised fish. The son of peasants from China’s hardscrabble southwest, Mr. Liu sold some of the family’s pigs in 1983 for what was then around $100 to buy some fish. Soon he went into the even more lucrative business of selling fish feed, and he eventually moved into pig feed and duck feed. The brand name, Keli, is a combination of the first and last Chinese characters from a famous paraphrasing of Karl Marx by Deng Xiaoping, the father of modern China: Science and technology are primary productive forces. According to Mr. Liu’s authorized biography, he faced local criticism at first for his early embrace of capitalism, and responded by saying that his fish feed was an improved product that followed Deng’s dictum. “When my business grows bigger,” he said at the time, “I will build another floor for labs. ” Plans to shift into computer chips did not pan out, so by 2006, he shifted to solar technology, after taking control of a company that made chemicals for the production of polysilicon, the crystalline raw material for solar panels. That move proved fortunate: China was just then embarking on a concerted effort to become a powerhouse. Over the next six years, Beijing pushed banks to provide at least $18 billion in loans at rates to manufacturers, and encouraged local governments to subsidize them with cheap land. China had more on its mind than just dominating solar exports: Its severe pollution problems and concerns that rising sea levels from climate change could devastate its teeming coastal cities lent urgency to efforts to develop green technology. At the same time, China also became a major player in wind power through similar policies. With ample assistance, China’s production capacity expanded more than tenfold from 2007 to 2012. Now six of the top 10 makers are Chinese, including the top two, compared with none a decade ago. The solar division of Mr. Liu’s company, the Tongwei Group, which discloses few financial details, is one of the players in the industry. That growth forced many American and European manufacturers into a headlong retreat. Two dozen of them filed for bankruptcy or cut back operations during President Barack Obama’s first term, damaging the heady optimism then about clean energy. In 2012 and 2013, the United States and the European Union concluded that Chinese makers were collecting government subsidies and dumping panels, or selling them for less than the cost of producing and shipping them. Both imposed import limits. Chinese manufacturers and officials denied improper subsidies and dumping, and still do. Several large Chinese manufacturers that had previously overexpanded and had been selling at heavy losses for years then closed their doors. But Western solar companies say Chinese banks still lent heavily to the survivors despite low rates from the defaults of big Chinese solar companies like Suntech, Chaori and LDK Solar. “The main subsidy is massive, loans by Chinese commercial banks to finance new capacity and also the massive ongoing losses of Chinese companies,” said Jürgen Stein, the president of American operations for SolarWorld, a big German panel maker. Li Junfeng, a top architect of China’s policies until he retired from that responsibility in early January, said that the West had exaggerated the role of the state in helping to finance Chinese manufacturers. “The market can decide for itself,” he said. “The good companies can get money, the bad companies cannot. ” Like the Chinese solar industry as a whole, Tongwei is thinking bigger. Mr. Liu’s company bought an enormous manufacturing complex in central China in 2013 from LDK Solar, which had run into severe financial difficulties. Now it plans to build factories of five gigawatts apiece in the Chinese cities of Chengdu and Hefei. By comparison, the entire global market is only about 77 gigawatts each year, while world capacity is 139 gigawatts. At the same time, Mr. Liu is dismissive of companies in the West that pioneered many solar technologies but have lost their market shares to China. “They are very jealous,” he said, “and cannot catch up with China’s pace. ” From an environmental standpoint, China’s solar push has been good for the world. prices have fallen close to 90 percent over the past decade. Many of the solar panels in America’s backyards and solar power plants are made by Chinese companies. But for the solar industry, Chinese expansion could mean an extended period of low prices and cutbacks for everybody else. “The solar industry is facing again, I would say, a new winter,” said Patrick Pouyanné, the chairman and chief executive of Total, the French oil and gas giant, which owns a controlling stake in SunPower, an American maker. China now hopes to replicate its solar industry’s growth in other areas. Under a plan called Made in China 2025, China hopes to become largely within seven years in a long list of industries, including aircraft, trains, computer chips and robots. The plan echoes the and buildup a decade ago, but with a larger checkbook. Made in China 2025 calls for roughly $300 billion in financial backing: inexpensive loans from banks, investment funds to acquire foreign technologies, and extensive research subsidies. If successful, Made in China 2025 would represent a fundamental shift in how China deals with the world. Initially, most of the industries that moved to China, such as shoe and clothing production, were already leaving the United States anyway. Heavy industries such as steel followed. While the shift was profound — some economists estimate that up to 2. 4 million American jobs were lost to China from 1999 to 2011, though others dispute that analysis — China has struggled in some areas like autos to create viable global competitors. American and European business groups have warned that the China 2025 plan means that a much wider range of Western businesses will face the same kind of competition that has already transformed the solar industry. “The policies started in solar and are now starting to infect the higher reaches of the economy with Made in China 2025,” said Jeremie Waterman, the president of the China Center at the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington. In the end, China did not slash subsidies for rooftop solar panels, and cut them only slightly for large arrays. But prices barely rebounded from last year’s slump. Mr. Gao, of Wuhan, is a slender whose dark hair is already thinning. He said that his business had depended not on homeowners but on investors who made use of the subsidies. The investors would pay of the cost of a homeowner’s system. The homeowner would take only enough electricity from the panels to power the home. The investor would sell the rest of the electricity to the grid at a high, price. The suggestion that the government might cut the subsidy, even though the government did not follow through on it, panicked his investors. So they stopped financing further deals. “They fear that the year after next, they may have nothing,” he said. He recently hired four more employees to drum up sales, even as installations creep along at a small fraction of demand a year ago. In Perrysburg, Mr. Abney lost his job at First Solar, the largest manufacturer based in the United States, and looked in vain for a job in the auto industry in the Toledo area. He ended up taking a job three weeks ago at a building materials company in Lancaster, Pa. His daughter is going off to college in the autumn, while his wife and son, a high school freshman now, will follow him to central Pennsylvania this summer. “It’s hardest on him because we’re pulling him away from his high school and his activities,” Mr. Abney said. First Solar struggled with improving Chinese technology as well as dropping prices. It laid off workers in Perrysburg partly because it decided not to produce its Series 5 generation of panels, which represented a limited improvement over its existing Series 4 panels. First Solar, to better compete with Chinese producers, will wait for its Series 6 panels to be ready for production in 2018. In the end, First Solar, which is based in Tempe, Ariz. laid off 1, 600 people worldwide. “It’s just kind of a shock factor when a lot of families realize they’re no longer going to have a job,” said Michael Olmstead, the Republican mayor of Perrysburg. Though Mr. Abney has started his new job at almost the same pay as his previous one, he says part of him pined for the days when the United States still led in solar energy, and when First Solar was at the forefront of that leadership. “They were good for us,” he said. “And it was great while it lasted. ” | 1 |
Liberty Blitzkrieg October 27, 2016
The name Peter Kadzik probably doesn’t ring a bell for many of you, although it probably should. This guy is a real piece of work, as an excellent article published earlier today at the Daily Caller demonstrates.
Here’s some of what we learned:
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, the Democrat’s campaign chairman, met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department.
The dinner arrangement, revealed in hacked Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.
Podesta and Kadzik, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, were in frequent contact, other emails show. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.
“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
Kadzik, who started at the DOJ in 2013, helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.
Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office.
In a Sept. 2008 email , which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign.
Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”
Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time.
“He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe.
Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.
Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.
Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon.
To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001.
A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”
The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon.
On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.
The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the WikiLeaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant.
The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just a day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.
Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows . And in an email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.
I’ll have the lobster risotto with a side of cronyism and middle class destruction.
As head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation.
The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.
But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress.
Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.
Seems like a pretty important decision for a Clinton crony to make.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the record for this article.
Could the Department of Injustice have any less credibility?
For more on the shameless and shady FBI “investigation” into Hillary Clinton, see: | 0 |
A little good, and a little bad here. First, Bob Klapisch wrote a great piece in USA Today about how he will vote for Curt Schilling to get into the Hall of Fame because he’s only concerned with Schilling’s performance on the field, not his politics or his tweets. [That would constitute the good. The bad comes courtesy of New York Giants Senior Vice President of Communications Pat Hanlon, who captioned a tweet promoting Klapisch’s article with a colorful message: Bob’s right. Being an asshole shouldn’t overshadow Schilling’s accomplishments. https: . — pat hanlon (@giantspathanlon) January 6, 2017, How in the world does a senior vice president of communications with over twenty years of experience communicating in media arrive at the conclusion that he should tweet that? How does the NFL tolerate it? Is that the kind of language or conduct the league expects from their executive communicators? Since the league has failed to take action against Hanlon, the answer is apparently yes. I’m sure the fact that Schilling is a conservative has nothing to do with the league refusing to act. Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn | 1 |
Neighbors Add To Hillary Sign With Blunt Message Of Their Own Next Door Posted on October 30, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This
When an apartment-dweller decided to use their entire balcony to show their support for the Democratic candidate, their clever neighbors to the right completed it with a blunt message of their own. By incorporating the “Hillary” sign into a sentence, the people in the building next door made the liberal regret hanging their stupid sign.
Unlike the sea of Donald Trump signs that fill neighborhoods throughout the country, it’s exceptionally rare to see a sign supporting Hillary Clinton for president. Perhaps this person of the top floor of a small apartment building was making up for that by being loud and proud of their criminal candidate, but the people parallel to them won the war of words in a big way.
John Nolte posted a photo of the opinionated neighbors, noting that he’s not sure where these buildings are, but the message they made was very clear. Rather than ripping the Hillary sign down, setting it on fire, or any other destructive act of vandalism that liberals have done to Trump signs, the clever conservative simply completed what the liberal should have said, adding “Is A Liar” to their windows so passersby read the overall display as “Hillary Is A Liar.” Photo of the war or words between neighbors, Tweeted by John Nolte
This statement is not only true but also proves the difference in each candidate’s followers when they disagree with something. The Trump supporters didn’t make a big deal about the Hillary-loving idiots, they had a sense of humor about it.
If it was the other way around, the outcome would have been damaging to the resident’s personal property and possibly even their person, because ignorant liberals get violent when they feel “offended” by something. Conservatives fight with facts, as these people did here by pointing out that Hillary is a liar and why they aren’t voting for her. | 0 |
AIDS “Patient Zero” Not the Source of the Outbreak Although responsible somewhat for the spread of AIDS, he didn't bring it to the US Image Credits: frolicsomepl/Pixabay .
Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV/Aids arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west.
Using sophisticated genetic techniques, an international team of researchers have revealed that the virus emerged from a pre-existing epidemic in the Caribbean, arrived in New York by the early 1970s and then spread westwards across the US.
The research also confirms that Gaétan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant, was not the first person in the US to be infected, despite being dubbed “Patient zero” in a study of gay men with Aids in 1984. Based on that study, author Randy Shilts named Dugas in 1987 and wrote that “there’s no doubt that Gaëtan played a key role in spreading the new virus from one end of the United States to the other.” | 0 |
A black man whose fatal shooting by the police in September prompted days of protests in Charlotte, N. C. died from gunshot wounds to the back and the abdomen, according to an autopsy performed at the request of his family. The results, released on Wednesday, show that the man, Keith Lamont Scott, was shot three times: in the back, the abdomen and the wrist. The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner’s Office has not yet released the results of its own autopsy. “The Scott family authorized this release of information because, as they have maintained from the very beginning, they are simply seeking transparency,” Charles G. Monnett, a lawyer for the family, said in a statement. “We will continue to pursue justice for this family. ” The autopsy was performed on Sept. 30, at the Newberry County Memorial Hospital morgue by Newberry Pathology Associates. Mr. Scott was in a sport utility vehicle in the parking lot of his apartment complex on Sept. 20 when police officers, there to serve a warrant on someone else, confronted him. He was rolling a marijuana cigarette and held a gun up, the police said. His family has disputed that Mr. Scott was armed. Officer Brentley Vinson, who is also black, fatally shot Mr. Scott, whose actions he perceived as threatening, the police have said. In obscured footage of the shooting, released by the Police Department, Mr. Scott did not appear threatening, although officers can be heard at one point shouting, “Drop the gun!” His right hand appeared empty, but it was unclear if he was holding anything in the other hand. The shooting immediately drew protests, which lasted for several days. On the second night, one protester was fatally shot. | 1 |
A wee reminder! Hope you can join us for some post-Halloween fun at our meetup on Wednesday, November 2.
Steve in Dallas has graciously arranged for us to convene at
Cantina Laredo 4546 Belt Line Rd Dallas, TX 75244
We’ll start at 5:00 PM. I’m sure I’ll be there until at least 8 PM.
Looking forward to another engaging and enjoyable event. I am flying into Dallas that AM, so the only caveat is that if the Dallas or NY airports are reported to be having serious problems in the morning, you might double check the site for updates (although I think you should plan on meeting regardless even if I wind up being delayed). See you soon! 0 0 0 0 0 0 This entry was posted in Notices on | 0 |
A boycott of Trump Winery products sold at Wegmans stores in Virginia appeared to backfire after the wine sold out at stores in the area. [The grocer said that nine of its Virginia stores sold out of the wine despite efforts to boycott the product and Wegmans stores that sold it, the Democrat and Chronicle reported. The Stop Trump Wine group from Charlottesville has asked Virginians to boycott any establishment that does business with Trump Winery, USA Today reported. The Washington Post reported that members of the National Organization for Women pressured Wegmans to stop selling the product just a few days before. A spokesman for the grocer said it sold products from the winery long before Trump bought it and gave it to his son to manage. Regardless of the grocery store’s intentions, Wegmans ended up on the #GrabYourWallet list of companies to boycott until they stopped selling the Trump brand. “I personally will not shop there,” Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, said in response to her members’ boycott. But the boycott has made some shoppers want to go out and buy more Trump Wine products. “This makes me want to dig in my heels, stand firm and buy Trump wine,” one shopper told USA Today. As a result of the boycott, all Wegmans stores in Virginia except one sold out of Trump Wine products. Wegmans said that its Charlottesville location was the only one with any bottles of Trump Wine left. The store said there were 160 bottles left of a Meritage and 18 left of a Cru as of midday Friday. Another boycott of products has also backfired recently. Ivanka Trump’s line of women’s fragrances soared to the number one spot on Amazon’s ’s list after retailers chose to stop selling products on their websites or at their locations, Breitbart News reported. | 1 |
JERUSALEM — “Mr. President!” a woman called out to Waad Qannam at a rally last week in East Jerusalem. “We want you to represent us!” The crowd cheered passionately, even though Mr. Qannam was actually running for president on a reality television show. In the United States, a reality television star is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. For Palestinians, it’s the other way around: A candidate chosen on a television show is the closest they have come to an elected leader in more than 10 years. “This is just a show,” acknowledged Mr. Qannam, one of three contestants who made it to Thursday night’s finale of “The President. ” “But people are hungry for a leader. ” The show, now in its second season, began with 24 contestants culled from more than 1, 200 applicants who had to take a series of exams on Palestinian politics, international law, development and gender equality. Each week, contestants shadowed a Palestinian minister or business person, then told a panel of judges what they had learned and how they would improve on the job. They also held election rallies while cameras were rolling and had to campaign for votes from the audience, who voted via text message at 80 cents a pop. A mix of votes from judges and the audience determined who made it to the next rounds, though in the finale only audience votes counted. Because there was no cap on how many times viewers could vote, money played a considerable role, and candidates raised funds to secure votes from viewers. On Thursday night, the three finalists all had similar platforms: Boycott Israel. Designate East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. Bring about a reconciliation for the bitterly divided Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza. (Six of the candidates in the round of 24 were from Gaza, though none made it to the final round.) Mr. Qannam — Muslim, male and from East Jerusalem — was the leading candidate. Studying to be a lawyer, Mr. Qannam, 24, is the son of refugees, broadening his appeal in the hardscrabble camps across the West Bank. His mother is a deputy minister of Jerusalem affairs in the Palestinian Authority. And he had a nice smile. The only female finalist, Nemah Adawiah, 22, studies international relations at Birzeit University near Ramallah. She drew some resentment because her wealthy family was bankrolling her campaign, and scrutiny about her appearance when the judges deemed some of her colorful outfits inappropriate. The third finalist, Fadi Khair, a Christian and pediatric nurse, had backers who felt he needed to broaden his appeal to Muslim voters. “You need a priest and a sheikh to sit in the front row,” mused a friend at a campaign meeting before Thursday’s finale. “The President” — broadcast on the Maan satellite network to large audiences in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab world — was funded mostly by a State Department grant to Search for Common Ground, a nongovernmental group that focuses on conflict resolution. Suheir Rasul, the group’s said the point of the show was to groom young Palestinians to be future leaders. Yet the subtext was aimed at the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who is now 11 years into what was meant to have been a term and has offered no signs of handing over power. In an odd twist, many judges on the show were Palestinian officials, and the Palestinian Authority allowed its organizers to use their facilities. Advisers to Mr. Abbas did not respond to requests for comment on the show. The show is “a message for the Palestinian leadership,” said Raed Othman, Maan’s general director. “Elections are the solution. Democracy is the solution. ” Before the finale, Mr. Khair, the pediatric nurse, was deeply worried about how to raise enough funds. “We focus on the rich, not the poor, because they barely have enough for their daily bread,” said his mother, Hannah Khair, before the finale. They were focusing on people in his hometown, Beit Sahour, a village in the West Bank, and Christians excited to see one of their own vie for president. Ahead of the penultimate episode, he spent about $7, 800 to secure nearly 10, 000 votes. As he prepared his speech for the final episode, Mr. Khair estimated he needed to secure at least 20, 000 votes to have a chance at winning. “I want to talk about economic resistance,” he said. “A call for foreign investment and Palestinian investment,” he said, but was interrupted by his wife, Mirna, 25, holding their son, Jihad, as he vomited on the kitchen floor. Mr. Khair continued while helping his wife. “I’ll talk about diplomacy,” he said. Ms. Adawiah’s family took care of nearly everything. Her father, Bahjat Adawiah, 72, organized her election rally on a recent night in Al Ram, a neighborhood near Jerusalem, tucked behind Israel’s separation barrier, where he owns several properties. “I am the daughter of Jerusalem!” she read, practicing her speech. Her father paced and . “Speak more forcefully!” he told her. “She wants to win, so I have to support her. She’s our little spoiled girl,” he added, grinning. But the show’s producers noted that Ms. Adawiah had worked extremely hard and impressed the judges. Money alone could not have propelled her to the finale, they said. Her father’s business partners, Al Ram’s mayor and other prominent residents piled into a school hall, where her rally underscored women’s participation: There was a female master of ceremonies, and a women’s folkloric dance troupe entertained guests. “We want you to be the president, and why not?” said Ali Maslamani, the mayor. “Our long Islamic history is filled with female leaders!” But Mr. Qannam was clearly the most popular candidate. In an East Jerusalem soccer club on a recent night, he barely got through his platform before residents began endorsing him. Mustafa Shabani, a who works two jobs to support his family, said he had spent at least $7 on votes for Mr. Qannam. Mr. Othman, the general director of Maan, said the influence of money made the show more realistic. “You can sit in a cafe and have a great idea — but so what?” he said. “Show me the money. ” During Thursday’s finale in a Ramallah studio, Mr. Khair stumbled through his speech. Ms. Adawiah laced hers with religion and nationalism. “It is time to change what is inside ourselves, so we can change our sick reality,” she said. In the end, though, it was Mr. Qannam’s night. “You are standing before an important decision!” he told the audience. He promised his first act as “president” would be to visit Gaza and heal a rift between Palestinians. “I will reconcile our nation!” “Were it not that I loved this homeland, I would not have done this,” he said. “This is a duty, not an honor!” The audience roared. “Waad Qannam! Waad Qannam! Waad Qannam!” the back rows shouted. Mr. Qannam won with nearly 42, 000 votes, compared with roughly 28, 000 for Ms. Adawiah and about 14, 000 for Mr. Khair. His prize? A car, plus the prominence and political connections that come from being on the show. He struggled to speak over the ecstatic audience. “This is not my victory!” he called out. “It is a victory for Palestine!” Nearby, that victory was hard to stomach. Ms. Adawiah’s family alleged that organizers had falsified the tally, arguing they had receipts for 41, 000 votes they had secured for their daughter. “I bought 24, 000 votes!” shouted one of her relatives. “Where are they?” | 1 |
Palestine Palestinians inspect the damaged house of Zaid Amer, after it was demolished by the Israeli army, in the West Bank city of Nablus, May 3, 2016. (Photo by AP)
Israeli troops have razed to the ground at least three houses in the East Jerusalem al-Quds, in the latest demolition of Palestinian property in the occupied territories.
Local media reported that Israeli forces demolished the buildings in the neighborhoods of Beit Hanina and Silwan on Wednesday without prior notice, displacing at least 44 Palestinians including children.
The United Nations has documented a dramatic rise in demolitions, saying 124 Palestinians, including 60 children, were left homeless in the occupied West Bank in a single day in April.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also said in August that a total of 726 Palestinian structures had been razed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds since January, and that the demolitions had affected 1,020 Palestinians.
The world body noted that there were 533 demolitions and 688 displaced Palestinians in the entire 2015, meaning that demolitions so far this year have increased more than 36 percent. This picture taken on March 14, 2011 shows a general view of a construction site in the West Bank settlement of Modiin Illit. (Photo by AP)
The demolitions have raised alarm among diplomats and human rights groups over Tel Aviv's sustained violation of international law. The demolished structures include houses and schools.
The Israeli razing of Palestinian homes along with its illegal settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories have dimmed hopes of any peace in the region.
Over half a million Israelis live in more than 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East al-Quds. The settlements are considered by the international community as illegal.
The occupied territories have witnessed increased tensions ever since Israeli forces imposed restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem al-Quds in August 2015.
Nearly 250 Palestinians have lost their lives at the hands of Israeli forces since the beginning of last October. Loading ... | 0 |
Chris Black November 9, 2016 3 Remedies From Medieval Europe To Heal The Common Cold
I think it was Hippocrates who said something along these lines: “let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food”.
Today’s article is about trying to find a cure for the common cold or, more precisely, reviving ancient remedies from medieval Europe.
And speaking of cures for cold, there’s another saying in my neck of the woods: if you take cold medicine, you’ll get better in seven days, otherwise you’ll be sick for a week.
Do you see where this is going?
Let me tell you another interesting little story: despite the fact that there are only a small number of basic ingredients to be found in OTC (over the counter) cold-medicine—around ten, give or take (ephedrine, ibuprofen, paracetamol, aspirin, pseudo-ephedrine etc.)—the number of cold-related drugs in your pharmacy is in the hundreds.
Each major pharmaceutical company that has a hand in the cold industry typically has at least 10 different types. Many have 20 or 30 or even more.
That’s pretty confusing, especially when you’re knocked out by a bad case of flu or cold , you can’t think straight, and you just want something to get you out of your misery. You’ll gladly spend a bunch of money to feel better.
Little do you know you’re wasting it on pure crap. Do you think I am exaggerating?
Basically, in the cold medicine racket, the name of the game is making money via marketing and brainwashing. Have you noticed the huge number of drug-ads on TV? 70% of the money a television is making outside an election is from Big Pharma, so let that sink in really well.
I am writing this article because last week I suffered from a bad case of cold, which rendered me pretty much useless until I started making and drinking an old cold/cough remedy that I learned from my grandmother.
Onion tea
It worked from day one, put me back on my feet, allowed me to think straight, to breathe and to write; you know what I mean.
And then I realized that for us preppers, knowing ancient remedies for a disease that is wreaking havoc this time of the year would make for an interesting article. So, if you’re into staying healthy without taking drugs, keep reading.
Let me tell you how it all began: awake at 4 AM. Can’t think, can’t write, can’t breathe, stuffy nose , sore throat. Does it sound familiar?
Well, I managed to crawl to my car and hit a local pharmacy. I bought some stuff pompously titled “cold medicine”, got home, medicated myself, hit the bed, and woke up 3 hours later still feeling horrible.
Then, it hit me: my grandmother used to make onion tea when I was little and I had a bad case of cold. I remember it smelled awful and tasted like rotten pig guts, but if I was a good boy and drank a lot of it, it worked.
With these things in mind, I went to the kitchen, gathered 3 onions, washed’em up pretty good, and put them in the kettle to boil.
The idea is to take 2-3 small onions and boil them slowly in a full kettle until the water is reduced by half via evaporation, then drink the tea as hot as you can stand it .
Trust me folks, it really works: sore throat-gone, stuffy nose-gone, I was alive again. It does taste hideous, unless you’re a die-hard onion lover, but it’s a small cost to pay.
Basically, with this magic potion you’ll be able to function, to be active: to be alive, so to speak, from day 1.
You must drink two 3/4 cups of tea per day, essentially one in the morning and one before bed, that’s important.
If you manage to squeeze 3 more in during the day, it will work like a Swiss watch.
If all you have in the house are big-fat onions, you’ll just have to cut them in half before boiling it, but remember: don’t remove the peel. That’s essential; just wash the onion thoroughly.
How does onion tea work? I really don’t know. There aren’t any “official” studies that I know of, probably because you can’t patent onions and sell them for 5 bucks a pop. It just does, provided you drink it hot as hell and you follow the recipe above.
Vitamin C
Besides onion tea, supplementing with vitamin C and D3 is also very important when it comes to mitigating colds and flu (these vitamins play an essential role in immunity overall), but it’s important to take big doses. The RDA is a joke.
For example, I am talking about 2-3 grams of vitamin C per day, together with eating lots of fruit: oranges, grapefruits, lemons, kiwis, apples and, again very important, raw onions and garlic (natural antibiotics).
The RDA is the minimal amount of Vitamin C (or whatever) to be taken daily in order to avoid getting scurvy (speaking of vitamin C). To be healthy, it takes for much more than that; remember that.
Tomato Tea
Another way of naturally treating a stuffy nose/nasal congestion is tomato tea.
The recipe is: 1 cup of tomato juice , (but I’d use 2-3 tomatoes cut in half instead of tomato juice) a teaspoon of fresh garlic (basically a clove) half a teaspoon of chili sauce (I’d use a small red hot chilli pepper instead) one teaspoon of lemon juice (again, I’d use a whole fruit instead).
Add a pinch of salt into the mix and heat them together in the kettle until they start boiling, then drink the tea as hot as you can take it.
During the day, you can drink a mix of green tea and ginger tea with honey, as these ingredients boost the immune system and they break up phlegm naturally (the drugs are called expectorants).
Streptococcal pharyngitis or strep throat is a common occurrence when it comes to seasonal colds and flu, and besides my aforementioned magic onion tea recipe, you should try 2 additional tricks if you want to get better ASAP: first, gargle with apple cider vinegar after you dilute it in a glass of warm water (1-3 teaspoons of vinegar in 8 oz of water).
Second, gargle with salt-water and if you’re hardcore, you can try rubbing your infected tonsils with salt (using your finger that is). It’s not a pleasant experience, but it works amazingly well. You can boost the recipe’s effectiveness by adding powdered cayenne pepper into the mix.
Add one teaspoon of cayenne pepper plus one teaspoon of salt in an 8 oz. glass, and mix well together, obviously. Gargle vigorously with this formula until you get better. It will definitely break up the bacteria coating in your throat so expect to spit profusely for a couple of minutes afterwards.
It’s very important to use high-quality, organic salt; not refined/processed stuff. I would recommend Himalayan salt (the pink variety), or salt-mine salt (the one that looks dirty). Processed, refined, snow white salt doesn’t work too great as it’s stripped of its essential trace elements.
I hope the article helped and I can’t wait to see your comments in the dedicated sections below, AFTER trying my onion tea, obviously.
Stay healthy folks and click the banner below to discover more ancient secrets that helped our ancestors survive harsh times.
Chris Black for Survivopedia. 25 total views, 25 views today | 0 |
President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, Ret. Gen. Mike Flynn, has reportedly offered his testimony in the investigation into Russian ties to the president in exchange for immunity, a report says. [Flynn has reportedly asked for immunity should his testimony lead to any finding of wrong doing, according to a Thursday report by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal claims that Flynn, a retired army general, and Trump campaign adviser, made his offer to the FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees through his lawyer. Officials have not yet accepted the deal, the paper says. Details of what Flynn might be willing to say to investigators have not been made public. Flynn was appointed as then Trump’s national security advisor in November of last year but resigned by February after revelations emerged that he had opened communications with Russian officials, communications about which he neglected to fully brief the vice president. In his resignation letter, Flynn apologized for neglecting to fully inform VP Pence about the discussions he had with the Russian ambassador saying the omission was due to the “fast pace of events. ” At the time of the resignation, Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the administration let Flynn go not due to any legal issues but due to “a trust issue. ” Spicer said that the “level of trust between the President and General Flynn had eroded to the point where he felt he had to make a change. ” Flynn is facing pressure from several inquiries into his dealings with Russian officials which include thousands he was paid by a trio of Russian companies for speeches made before he joined Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, as well as his communications with the Russian ambassador. Flynn’s offer to testify comes as Democrats continue to press for investigations into ties Trump may have had with Russia. To date there has been no direct ties proven between Trump or his campaign for president and Russia. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
PARIS — In the age of Donald J. Trump, “Brexit” and the resurgent French far right, a thin, aging career politician with an ironic smile is being called — by him and his supporters — France’s best defense against raging global populism. A first test for Alain Juppé, 71, comes Sunday as France’s mainstream Republican party holds a primary ahead of next spring’s presidential election. Mr. Juppé is favored to come out on top, for now. His ascendance is all the more improbable because, in a previous post, he was considered one of France’s most unpopular prime ministers ever. And he was once convicted in a Paris City Hall corruption scheme. But the election of Mr. Trump has upended French politics and given new momentum to the leader Marine Le Pen. As a result, mainstream conservatives are far from delighted. The candidacy of the Mr. Juppé is seen by his supporters as a bulwark at a time when the postelection United States is now routinely depicted as one leg of a global tripartite menace, along with China and Russia, bearing down on fragile Western democracies. Mr. Juppé doesn’t shout, wave his arms or make grandiose promises — seen as a plus by his supporters. His professorial bearing stands in contrast to his sometimes bombastic and offending party rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president who has redefined himself as a tough guy for uncertain times. But while other contenders for the presidency are adopting Mr. Trump’s depiction of Muslims as an inherent threat, Mr. Juppé’s soothing message of French unity has, so far, helped him to lead opinion polls. Still, Mr. Juppé’s tenure as prime minister during the 1990s was one of the most divisive in modern French history, marked by proposed cutbacks to generous pensions that brought thousands into the streets in protest. Mr. Juppé’s plan ultimately failed. This time around, he has promised more reforms and has vowed not to back down in the face of inevitable protests. In that regard, the technocratic Mr. Juppé, of all the contenders, may present the biggest challenge to France’s social protections and labor rules. The governing Socialists, saddled with a poor economic record and an unpopular incumbent president, François Hollande, are already being written off. The race is considered the right’s to lose. Just behind Mr. Sarkozy in the polls, nipping at his heels, is another former prime minister, François Fillon. The winner of Sunday’s Republican primary — there will be a runoff on Nov. 27 — is considered likely to face Ms. Le Pen in April’s presidential election. If previous patterns hold, Ms. Le Pen will be defeated, which would make Mr. Juppé the likeliest of all those now running to become the next French president. The announcement on Wednesday by Emmanuel Macron, a popular former economy minister in the Socialist government, that he, too, will enter the presidential race is unlikely to change the right and dynamic, in the eyes of many observers. At 38, Mr. Macron has the image of a youthful reformer, but analysts have noted his thin record, lack of a party base, and absence of heft — he has never held elected office — in a universe of surging populism. Mr. Juppé, on the other hand, has won and lost numerous elections and has served for many years as the mayor of Bordeaux, where he has been credited with transforming the city. But, with high unemployment, an injection of energy from Mr. Trump’s victory into Ms. Le Pen’s campaign — xenophobic nationalism is her core theme — and the same social and economic fractures as in the United States, there are no guarantees. The warning signs from across the Atlantic were evident in a campaign swing through Lower Burgundy on Wednesday, as Mr. Juppé met with disgruntled farmers and rural officials. The French news media has noted that the American election results have colored the former prime minister’s message with concern about the existence of two Frances: one benefiting from globalization, and the other left behind. There are the large, vibrant cities — Paris, Lyon, Mr. Juppé’s Bordeaux — and then there are the shuttered main streets of sleepy provincial capitals and rural towns like those he visited on Wednesday. Wearing the coat and tie he appears never to shed, Mr. Juppé got his shoes muddy at a grain and dairy farm whose owner complained of crushing debt. “People have talked about suffering,” Mr. Juppé told a roomful in the tiny village of St. ’Ordon, “and it is true,” he said, speaking in a knowing, weary tone, careful never to exaggerate. With his eyebrows slightly arched, he listened patiently to the complaints. Rural France feels “abandoned” and “disdained” by Paris, Mr. Juppé said. “But we can’t accept this gulf between the big cities and rural France. ” Promising a “strong state,” he had a warning for his audience deep in the Burgundian countryside at St. : “The world is becoming more and more dangerous. Nationalism is on the rise. ” Similarly, at a rally this week in northern Paris, the perceived menace of rising populism was a common theme in the speeches and comments of Mr. Juppé’s supporters. From Mr. Juppé himself and the other speakers who preceded him, Mr. Trump’s name came up often. Each time, it was met with loud boos from the crowd of around 6, 000. Mr. Juppé — “a man of culture,” one speaker called him — was depicted as the antithesis of Mr. Trump. “After the election of Donald Trump, after Brexit, will populism triumph in our country? No!” shouted Patrick Devedjian, a former minister, who introduced Mr. Juppé at the rally. The crowd — mostly or older, and carefully dressed, like Mr. Juppé — roared approval. “We’ve had it up to here with populist baseness!” Mr. Devedjian said. Another supporter, Lagarde, a prominent centrist politician, told the crowd, “France doesn’t need a in the Élysée!” — referring to the presidential palace in Paris. Valérie Pécresse, president of the Paris region’s council, was equally scathing. “Populism is about not telling the truth,” she said. “Alain,” she added, turning to Mr. Juppé, seated in the front row, “you are the antidote to populism. ” Mr. Juppé, who spoke in pithy bullet points, promised to stand up to enemies and rivals — both internal and external. In a brisk speech that reflected his classical education at France’s top schools, he brought up Mr. Trump in the context of threats to France. “I don’t know what Donald Trump’s foreign policy will be,” he told the crowd. “He has said contradictory things. What I know is, there will be an aggressive commercial policy. So we must be aggressive, too. ” Setting himself up as a defender of European unity — Ms. Le Pen is fiercely opposed to the European Union — Mr. Juppé said: “France can be a world power, in thrall to nobody. But separated, we will be vassals of the big empires all around us: Russia, China and the U. S. ” Afterward, encountered on the boulevard outside the rally, he wondered whether his comments about Mr. Trump had been too “offensive. ” Mr. Juppé has served twice as France’s foreign minister and chooses his words carefully. But then he shrugged his shoulders, saying about Mr. Trump, “We’ll see. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump on Wednesday selected Sonny Perdue, the former governor of Georgia, to be his secretary of agriculture, two senior transition officials said, making his final cabinet selection two days before he is to be sworn in as president. Mr. Perdue, a onetime veterinarian who was elected in 2003 as Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, campaigned heavily for Mr. Trump in the final months of the presidential race, although he had initially backed a rival, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. His selection ensures that Mr. Trump will enter office with a full complement of chosen cabinet officials, although none have been confirmed. Senators are wrangling over how many nominees can be confirmed by the time Mr. Trump is sworn in on Friday, with Republicans insisting on a series of quick votes and Democrats objecting that they have not had adequate time to vet the candidates, many of whom submitted ethics disclosures late. The two officials confirmed the decision on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on it before the formal announcement. Mr. Perdue has spoken with Mr. Trump in detail about his views on agriculture and trade, including ways to ensure American producers are not placed at a disadvantage in international agreements. In an interview in December, Mr. Perdue said Mr. Trump had quizzed him on what he would do about unfair trade deals. He said the “believes that we in the U. S. have been sort of patsies over the years in the way we’ve dealt with our foreign competitors and international trade. ” Mr. Perdue, who once ran a grain and fertilizer business, was among the first candidates Mr. Trump interviewed for the post. But the process dragged on for weeks as the ’s team debated whether it would be better off choosing someone from a different part of the country or selecting an ethnic minority to balance out an overwhelmingly white, male and wealthy cabinet. Mr. Perdue, though, pitched himself as an asset with the business and governmental experience to be successful in the post. He spent much of his career in the agriculture business before being elected governor, he told Mr. Trump, and returned to the field in 2011 after leaving office. “Most people focus on the governor term of eight years, but for me, that was an interruption,” Mr. Perdue said in December. Mr. Trump, he said, “wants people who are experts in the field. ” As governor, amid a drought in Georgia in 2007, Mr. Perdue led several hundred people at the State Capitol in a prayer for rain, asking God to forgive Georgia for being wasteful with its water. He also called for strict water usage restrictions. Eric Tanenblatt, Mr. Perdue’s former chief of staff, called him highly qualified for the post in a statement on Wednesday night. “As a successful governor, Perdue has the requisite experience to direct a massive bureaucracy of the sort necessary to conduct the department’s many programs,” Mr. Tanenblatt said. He praised Mr. Perdue’s ability to shape agricultural policy and business. Mr. Perdue, he said, “knows the challenges facing today’s farmers. ” Environmental activists condemned Mr. Trump’s choice, saying that Mr. Perdue had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies that help chemical companies and large agriculture conglomerates at the expense of small farmers and the environment. “It’s certainly hard to imagine that a former fertilizer salesman will tackle the unregulated farm pollution that poisons our drinking water, turns Lake Erie green, and fouls the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at EWG, an environmental research group. If confirmed, Mr. Perdue would oversee an agency with a $150 billion budget. The Agriculture Department is in charge of farm policy and food safety, and it funds food stamps, other nutrition programs and the Forest Service. A conservative Republican, Mr. Perdue has ties to at least one senator who will vote on his confirmation. Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, is his cousin. | 1 |
Putin Ready To Invade Ukraine World War Three WW3 Educational Forum and Library Welcome, Guest . Please login or register . Login with username, password and session length | 0 |
Toxic chemicals found in children’s Halloween makeup – study Toxic chemicals found in children’s Halloween makeup – study By 0 73
Halloween is supposed to make your skin crawl, but not like this. A new study finds the scariest part of the holiday may not be the costumes, but makeup for kids. Out of 48 makeup palettes, almost half contained toxic heavy metals.
Nearly 20 percent of makeup palettes contain lead and cadmium, according to the newly published study by the Breast Cancer Fund. The study found that some products contained as many as four metals, including arsenic and chromium.
Nine of the palettes were found to contain lead, a chemical that is unsafe at any level, for children particularly. Parents may have purchased and applied these products to their children unwittingly, as the makeup doesn’t have to list ingredients on their labels.
The BCF may have been among the first to test the palettes, as the FDA does not regulate this particular product.
“ The FDA that regulates makeup does not have the power to require pre-market testing ,” Jen Coleman with the Oregon Environmental Council told KGW.
The cosmetic safety law enacted 75 years ago does not require testing even for products marketed to children. While the FDA cannot do anything about the problem, they have issued guidelines to avoiding “ a rash, swollen eyelids, or other reaction ” this Halloween.
The guidelines make no mention of potential heavy metal poisoning, but they do offer advice like “ Follow all directions carefully ,” and “ Don’t decorate your face with things that aren’t intended for your skin. ”
What’s a parent to do in the meantime? Other than use all-natural makeup, the best option is to avoid dark pigments. The BCF study found a correlation between the darkness of the color and the lead content. The darker the color, the more lead it was found to contain.
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license. | 0 |
Breitbart financial editor John Carney talked with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday about the latest economic indicators now that President Trump has taken office. “People are very confident about the future,” said Carney. [Along with positive housing data, “consumer purchases rose by five percent, which was the largest increase in three months,” added Carney. “Consumer spending is about seventy percent of the U. S. economy, so when we say consumer spending picked up, we mean the entire economy is doing better. ” Based on the overall numbers, which Carney and Marlow discussed in detail, “people think the future looks good for them,” Carney said. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
A north Texas transgender high school wrestler, transitioning from female to male, won a girls’ regional championship when the female opponent forfeited the match over the weekend. [Euless Trinity High School junior Mack Beggs, 17, triumphed in the girls’ Class 6A Region 2 championship against Coppell high schooler Madeline Rocha, who declined to participate in the wrestling match on Saturday. The forfeit was expected. The Dallas Morning News reported Coppell attorney Jim Baudhuin filed a lawsuit earlier in February against the University Interscholastic League (UIL) the governing body over Texas high school athletics, music, and academic events. He urged the league to suspend Beggs over steroid use, which is prohibited by UIL rules and the Texas Education Code. Beggs takes testosterone while transitioning from female to male. Baudhuin’s complaint asserted that allowing Beggs to wrestle competitively while using testosterone exposed the other athletes to the “imminent threat of bodily harm. ” Baudhuin is also a wrestling parent, but his daughter does not compete in the same weight class as Beggs. He contended the lawsuit had nothing to do with Beggs being a transgender male but over Coppell coaches concerned that wrestling Beggs would be unsafe for their wrestler. The transgender student’s grandmother and guardian, Nancy Beggs, called the forfeited match “about bias, hatred, and ignorance,” according to the Dallas paper. Chapter 38 of the Texas Education Code forbids steroid and human growth hormone usage in athletics for enhancement purposes, considering it a criminal offense punishable by prison time however, it does permit the use of anabolic steroids for “medical use only” when a doctor prescribes treatment for the individual. Similarly, the UIL allows a “licensed practitioner with prescriptive authority” to administer a steroid for a person. Even though Beggs identifies as male, the wrestler must compete against girls because of a UIL rule that requires to compete by the gender listed on their birth certificates. In early 2016, Texas public school district superintendents voted in favor of an amendment requiring state officials to use a ’s birth certificate to determine gender identification, Breitbart Texas reported. That rule went into effect on August 1, although former Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams previously approved the amendment as part of an 11 rule packet in November 2015. It codified what the league already advised superintendents do in handling such situations — use birth certificates when gender questions arise. The UIL Wrestling Manual prohibits boys and girls from grappling with each other in Texas. Coupled with the birth certificate rule, it disqualified Beggs from sparring against boys. Nancy Beggs, told the Morning News that her grandchild wants to compete against boys but is willing to follow UIL rules. She said they sent the teen’s medical records to the league before the and current wrestling seasons. The UIL approved the Euless to compete. While Beggs and Rocha did not wrestle Saturday, both advanced to the state championships. The night before, Beggs competed against Grand Prairie high school female wrestler Kailyn Clay in a semifinal match, which Beggs won by a pin. Wrestling Texas lists Beggs as undefeated ( ) this year. The UIL maintains a “ ” policy that allows equal opportunity no matter disability, race, color, gender, religion, or national origin, as reported by Breitbart Texas. There are some exceptions to that general policy. The University of Texas at Austin created the UIL in 1910 to assist public school athletic and debate teachers. The league evolved into the largest organization of its kind in the world. Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter. | 1 |
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A plane carrying Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence skidded off the runway and tore up the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport in New York City on Thursday night.
The Boeing 737 reportedly “overshot” the runway. There were no reported injuries.
Pence took to Twitter to ensure the nation that he was unharmed. So thankful everyone on our plane is safe. Grateful for our first responders & the concern & prayers of so many. Back on the trail tomorrow! — Mike Pence (@mike_pence) October 28, 2016
The videos and photos of the scene were pretty striking. Clearly, the situation could have turned out much worse. This was the Tarmac when we landed on the @mike_pence plane- torn up concrete pic.twitter.com/hEYodMkord — Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) October 28, 2016 Photo shows Mike Pence's plane after it skidded off the runway at NYC's LaGuardia Airport; no injuries reported. https://t.co/1o6QoRkewr pic.twitter.com/xx02LAm9sg — ABC News (@ABC) October 28, 2016 #BREAKING : VP candidate @mike_pence 's campaign plane slides off rainy runway at LGA in NYC; no one injured https://t.co/ApiI0IFS5x pic.twitter.com/LjlgASGNWA | 0 |
Share This: PATRICE GREANVILLE T he problem is that, while helpful to have the empire’s managers show their true sociopathic face, her narrative is a distorted simplification bearing all the vices of her political prejudices and ignorance, the script favored by the US ruling class.
Consider just one of her major lies, tossed about casually and sure to be swallowed whole by the perennially clueless audience: That The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan… The USSR did not invade Afghanistan . The besieged, progressive and modernising Kabul government—a leftwing government that promptly moved to advance literacy, gave women full and unrestricted civil rights, and in general was trying to bring the nation out of the middle ages (program which Washington could care less), invited the Soviets to come in, as it was meeting stiff resistance to its reforms by the entrenched landlords and reactionary clerics in the countryside. Moscow accepted the invitation because it also suited its valid objective of not allowing the Americans to plant another huge military base on the Central Asia underbelly, part of the encirclement of Russia the US has been carrying out for many decades. The invitation is similar and as genuine as the invitation by the Government of Syria, today, to come in and fight against the Western-sponsored terrorists, an authority to set foot on Syrian soil which the Americans and their multiple sordid accomplices in mayhem in the Middle East, totally lack. Contrast this with Washington’s actions in Vietnam, where it first refused to recognize the right of the newly independent Vietnamese to a free election (since they knew the communists led by Ho Chi Minh would win by a huge margin), and then simply invaded that nation under trumped up pretexts (Gulf of Tonkin, etc.).The closer you inspect the US government narrative, the clearer it becomes it is a tissue of cynical big lies, word-twistings, professional pr.r. spin, and self-serving myths and simplifications—all in the service of sordid and criminal goals the elites can never admit to the American public.
PHOTOS: Above—Afghan women college students, a total novelty in Kabul, sporting Western dress, etc. (1978). Afghan women studying, as equals, in Kabul, 1979. The communist government in power then (PDPA, the People’s Democratic party of Afghanistan) actually liberated Afghan women from centuries old customs that effectively enslaved them to husband and society. As usual, Western bourgeois feminists have said virtually nothing about the tremendous losses suffered by women and children as a result of Washington’s intervention in Afghanistan on the side of the most reactionary sectors of society. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS | 0 |
November 3, 2016 Mind-blowing Bible translating taking place
A missionary is seeing first-hand how new technology is accelerating the trace of Bible translation like never before.
Mark Thrash works with Wycliffe Associates traveling the world installing hi-tech computer equipment for national translators in an effort to greatly expedite the process. He says it used to take 20 to 40 years to translate the Bible in a heart language, but now it can be done in weeks.
Thrash tells OneNewsNow about an experience with 121 church leaders in a Southeast Asian country.
“They worked 8-12 hours a day for a month, and they got a solid draft of the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, done,” he details. “I don’t know about you, but that completely blows my mind.”
And he believes that demonstrates how God’s Word is a treasure. | 0 |
Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief John Podesta attacked the First Amendment rights of the free press as he continued to spin his conspiracy theory of Russia colluding with American news websites to damage Democrats. [During a conversation with the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, he cited the “participation and the support of the media,” naming “guys like Sean Hannity” and “disgusting” Newt Gingrich for helping spread “fake news” to hurt Democrats. He specifically criticized Hannity and Gingrich for asking questions about DNC staffer Seth Rich’s murder and whether or not it had a connection with Wikileaks. Podesta explained that it was one more example of how the Russians were “very active in propagating and distributing fake news, working with these sites in conjunction with them. ” He also cited an “echo system” created by the Russians that raised the social media profile of articles that were damaging to Democrats. He pointed out that “legitimate sites” like the Washington Post and the New York Times suffered, as other “ ” websites got more traction during the election. Podesta blamed websites in the United States for publishing emails from Emmanuel Macron during the French presidential election to influence the outcome. “The first reports of them came from U. S. sites back into France,” he said. “This is a global phenomena. ” He praised the French media for helping censor the information to stop it from damaging Macron’s campaign. “I think unfortunately for us, but maybe fortunately for the world, I think the French press was more sensitive to it,” he said, praising them for helping Macron “win by a landslide” after censoring their reporting on the hacked emails. He suggested that the American media should have done the same things with his leaked emails. “I didn’t feel like that really happened last fall … the mainstream U. S. press was much more interested in the gossip,” he said. Podesta warned the media about Russia’s efforts to use the emails to hurt Democrats, pointedly directing them to be more responsible. He suggested that the media should have helped the Clinton campaign fuel the Russian angle, instead of reporting on his emails. “I think if you contextualize it — if you say that ‘The Russians are coming,’ and ‘The Russians are here’ — that can give people a sense of that they need to be more careful in the way they assess what they’re hearing and what they’re seeing and what’s being peddled,” he said. He described the period of leaks as “the Soviet days” and griped that the “low burn” of email stories helped revive questions about Clinton’s own private emails. “We hadn’t put it to bed completely,” he admitted. | 1 |
One conservative group produced colorful flow charts warning millennials that a “border adjustment” tax proposed by Speaker Paul D. Ryan would raise prices on “the Jose Cuervo tequila that’s in your happy hour margarita. ” Three days later, a second conservative group kicked off a lobbying campaign saying it would amount to a $1. 2 trillion tax on seniors and the working poor. The next day, still another group weighed in, issuing a news release that highlighted how Latinos would be “among those hardest hit” by the new tax on imports. All three organizations share a common lineage: They are part of the political network overseen by Charles D. and David H. Koch, the billionaire conservative businessmen. Now they are among a host of conservative organizations mounting a furious campaign against a new tax on imports proposed by House Republicans, imperiling what is supposed to be a centerpiece of the Republican tax overhaul effort. Their opposition threatens yet another rupture with President Trump, some of whose advisers see the provision as a critical way to bring about tax reform while protecting American manufacturers. The battle could not only jeopardize Mr. Trump’s second major legislative initiative, but also redefine the boundaries of conservative economic policy. Much like the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the import tax is dividing conservatives, the business sector and some of the groups funding conservative politics. Along the way, it is exposing the broader ideological divide between nationalist policies embraced by Mr. Trump and the traditional movement that his election ejected from the driver’s seat of Republican . “Trump ran on a different set of economic issues than traditional conservative Republicans have,” said Stephen Moore, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who favors the border tax on intellectual grounds, but said he had come to see it as a “poison pill” for broader tax reform. “The baton has been passed on from Reagan to Trump,” Mr. Moore continued, “and there’s no doubt he ran on a much more populist economic message. ” The idea of a border adjustment tax has percolated among academic economists and in think tanks since the 1970s, as the United States has considered ways of harmonizing its tax code with countries that use taxes. Central to the plan is a provision that would tax imports at a rate of 20 percent while exempting exports from taxation. In theory, this would buttress domestic manufacturing, make American products more competitive with foreign goods and encourage American companies to bring home cash they have been parking overseas. “It is a simple and elegant way to get good tax compliance,” said Douglas a Republican economist and president of the American Action Forum, a nonprofit tied to a “super PAC” that backs House Republicans. Some conservatives oppose it for the same reason: In their view, such a tax would be too easy to increase, with the potential costs to Americans hidden behind rising prices. Groups like Americans for Tax Reform — headed by Grover Norquist, perhaps Washington’s most famous crusader — have praised the border tax proposal, saying it would put American businesses “on a level playing field” with foreign competitors. Retailers that import many of their goods are lobbying against the idea, while domestic manufacturers like Boeing and Caterpillar — whose interests figure heavily in Mr. Trump’s economic thinking — are supporting it. The Koch network and groups like the Club for Growth, which for years have targeted what they call “crony capitalism” in Washington, have opposed the border tax as an unnecessary tax increase and a form of favoritism that would hurt the economy. But Mr. Trump and his team have pledged to target what they see as a more insidious kind of cronyism, including unfettered free trade that some Trump advisers say benefits wealthy elites at the expense of American workers. The dispute echoes Mr. Trump’s battles with his party last year, when the Club for Growth, a group of wealthy conservatives that backs candidates in Republican primary races, financed a advertising campaign against him. The Koch network, uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s proposals on trade and immigration, sat out the presidential election entirely, turning its advertising dollars and activists to races. Both the Club for Growth and the Koch network also played a critical role in killing a proposal backed by Mr. Ryan and Mr. Trump to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. In March, as the repeal vote approached, two groups pledged to spend upward of $1 million on ads defending any Republican who voted against the replacement legislation. Now, some of the same groups are organizing visits to lawmakers and paying for an online advertising campaign attacking the border tax proposal. The roster includes Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s flagship political advocacy group the Libre Initiative, which is aimed at Latinos and Generation Opportunity, which focuses on young adults. In 2015, the most recent year for which tax returns are available, the three groups took in a combined $34 million from Freedom Partners, an umbrella group representing the Kochs and other donors who pool money for political and educational initiatives. Policy experts at think tanks financed by the Koch network have also weighed in against the border tax idea. Veronique de Rugy, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, where Charles Koch sits on the board, has clashed with Mr. and other policy experts, accusing them of misleading the public about the true effects of the border tax on economic growth. Americans for Prosperity is calling on Mr. Trump to rely more on spending cuts, rather than on a border adjustment tax, to finance the tax overhaul. The group’s list of proposals include indexing Social Security benefits to a different measure of inflation — a popular idea in conventional conservative circles but one that could violate Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to protect the program’s beneficiaries. “When you look at the network broadly, we’re all guided by the same vision,” said James Davis, a spokesman for Freedom Partners. “We’re all going to be active on the major policy decisions that are happening in Washington. ” That campaign has aligned with a vigorous lobbying campaign by Koch Industries, one of the largest private companies in the United States, prompting complaints from some proponents of the tax that the family is chiefly interested in protecting its business. Last fall, after the House plan for a border tax was first unveiled, lobbyists from Koch Industries circulated a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers showing it would lead to huge new taxes on the petroleum and coal products industry, which includes some of Koch Industries’ most profitable subsidiaries. More recently, Koch has circulated studies indicating that the tax would increase the price of gasoline, which the company says would lift its profits in the short term but harm the economy in the long term. Philip Ellender, a top executive at the company, said in an interview that Koch Industries was lobbying against the new tax out of principle, not for profit. “In the short term, Koch would profit handsomely from it,” Mr. Ellender said. His summary of the company’s case against the tax: “It would stifle free trade, it picks winners and losers, and it raises prices on consumers so that corporations can get a tax break. ” The debate has divided the White House, too. In an interview with Reuters in late February, Mr. Trump embraced the notion of a border tax. “I certainly support a form of tax on the border,” he said, arguing that it would encourage companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, a critical component of his platform. Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn — both former Goldman Sachs bankers — are said to be leery of the border tax. Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, the former Breitbart publisher Stephen K. Bannon, has supported it, as has Peter Navarro, a trade skeptic and top White House trade adviser. A profusion of strategic and political motives also divides Republicans on the issue. To enact a tax overhaul that does not increase the federal deficit but delivers rate cuts to wealthy taxpayers and corporations, Mr. Trump and Congress need to find some source of new revenue — hence the border tax. For Mr. Ryan, who holds more conventional views than Mr. Trump, the new tax provides a way to satisfy Mr. Trump’s protectionist impulses without imposing punitive, and potentially even more disruptive, tariffs. But some conservatives are not so sure. In opposing the tax, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Walmart’s home state, Arkansas, finds himself in the position of defending his local corporate giant and the conservatism that he thought he knew. “Most conservatives I know have long believed that tax reform would look at all of the in the tax code,” Mr. Cotton said, “not introduce a whole new concept of taxation. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — It’s finally here. Inauguration Week. Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States on Friday, January 20. Here are some important details to know if you plan on attending (or watching) the transition of power. [When Where: Most of the festivities will take place Thursday, Jan. 19 through Saturday, Jan. 21 — with Friday being the official date. Unofficial events, however, will be taking place all week across the nation’s capitol. Here are the basic from the welcoming ceremony, to the swearing in, to the parade. Transportation: DON’T DRIVE. Whatever you do, do not attempt to drive around downtown D. C. later this week. Between the barricades, road closures and sheer amount of spectators, driving will be next to impossible. Take the metro instead and pick up a limited edition SmarTrip card commemorating the inauguration (while supplies last). This fancy $10 card (a 30% savings, mind you) comes with a pass for unlimited Metrobus and Metrorail rides. What’s even better is you can keep the card: it’s valid both before and after Jan. 20. Add money to it by going online at wmata. com. Note: A few metro stations will be closed within the security perimeter. For all the metro specifics, click here. For those who choose to use a ride sharing app like Uber or Lyft, be warned: there will be a geofence in place around the security perimeter. According to USA Today, “the security perimeter will go into effect 48 hours before the ceremony and last until Sunday morning in some areas. ” But never fear, “Uber has worked with officials for months to prepare for Inauguration Day, the company said. Its engineers altered its navigation systems to account for road closures and blackout zones and changed dispatch algorithms, so vehicles won’t be matched with riders on the other side of a barrier. ” Bottom line: Leave early and pack patience. Accommodations: If you don’t already have a place to stay, good luck. List of Prohibited Items: Ammunition, explosives, weapons — you know, the usuals. But careful, and balloons also make the long list of “ ’s”. Click here for a complete list of prohibited items. Weather: Latest weather forecast models indicate that Trump’s big day may be warmer than normal, with current predictions of temperatures in the 50s and 60s. One would be wise though to come prepared for a chilly few days. Wear layers and don’t forget comfortable shoes: all public events take place outside. Oh, and don’t forget an umbrella, there’s a chance of rain! Security Measures — for the curious: Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said officials expect from 700, 000 to 900, 000 attendees this week, with 99 groups expected to demonstrate either for or against Donald Trump. With a price tag of tens of millions of dollars, a lot of security measures are coming together, and it’s not just the usual metal detectors and bag checks — though there will be plenty of that. Rooftop snipers, boat restrictions in the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, and “multilevel perimeters” along the viewing areas and parade route will be set in place. Manhole covers are being welded shut, and light poles, trash cans, and even mailboxes are being removed from the area. Officials say there will be some 28, 000 security personnel dedicated to keeping spectators safe. In addition to local law enforcement officers, and those being brought in from this includes help from the Department of Homeland Security, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, and Coast Guard, as well as troops from the National Guard. Staying Safe: Despite the beefed up security, there are still some safety precautions one can take. Don’t carry a ton cash, use a purse with zippers (or even better, a cross body bag) and pack photocopies of all your important documents (think ID, credit cards, airline tickets, etc. ). With such an influx of people, its bound someone is going to get lost. Be sure all children, disabled and elderly people carry an information card, including their name, address, emergency contact info, and medical information. There is also the potential that some protests may get violent. If this happens, move away from the action as calmly and quickly as possible. Avoid becoming involved and keep your loved ones close. Move into a safe, enclosed area and stay alert. To sign up for alerts text INAUGURATION to 888777 to receive updates from Park Police on road closures, missing persons, crime and emergencies. To report emergencies, call 911 or Park Police at (202) . : For all the balls, galas, receptions and parties, check out these guides. Many of these are but tickets may be purchased for several. | 1 |
250 Views November 03, 2016 1 Comment Analyses The Saker
Last May I wrote an article entitled Counter-propaganda, Russian style in which I explained that far from banning or censoring the western anti-Putin/anti-Russia campaign, the Russia media reported about it in meticulous detail. Half a year later, not only is this still true, but the level of coverage has now sharply increased. Check out this screenshot from the latest (and most watched) weekly news show: “Painting Putin” on Russian TV
Remember that roughly 80% plus of the audience watching this are strong supporters of President Putin. You can imagine what they think when they see these reports. The fully understand that the West hates Putin so much precisely because Putin is one of them, a real Russian who cares for the interests of the Russian people. So when the West demonizes Putin, it is really all the Russian people who are demonized and their conclusion is simple: the West does not hate Putin, the West hates *us*. As for “Blame it on Putin”– it has now become a real joke. Source: the (pro-Western) Levada Center
One of the main effects of this kind of demonization is that the Russian public fully understands that there is no way back. In practical terms, most Russians believe that even if Russia pulled out of Syria, stopped supporting the Donbass or even decided to hand Crimea to the Ukies, the West would still continue to demonize Russia and try to subdue her . Furthermore, the Russians remember that the only time when the West liked Russia was when she was run by the drunken Eltsin and his coterie of Jewish oligarchs who pillaged Russia and whose reign had consequences similar to what a major war would result in. Any other Russia is simply unacceptable to the AngloZionist Empire.
Seen in this light, the alliance of the West with both the Nazis in Kiev and the “moderate terrorists” in the Middle-East makes sense. This is not fundamentally different from the European’s alliance with the Ottomans during the Crimean War or the USA supported Japan against Russia in 1905 (only to then end up fighting against Japan a few years later). As long as X is anti-Russian, the West support X. It’s that primitive and that stupid.
The Ukronazi regime in Kiev has understood that it has only one “commodity” left which it can sell to the West: its rabid russophobia. And since they are desperate, they make desperate and, frankly, comical efforts. Check out the new symbol of the Ukie military intelligence service: The Ukies point a dagger at the heart of Russia
I don’t think I have ever seen the Ukie inferiority complex better illustrated. The Latin sentence “ Sapiens Dominabitur Astra ” (“the wise will rule the stars”) is a nice touch as it combines a non-cyrillic (Latin) alphabet, a reference to European astrology in the Middle Ages and a typically Ukrainian (cosmic) megalomania. Yet another proof, if needed, that all the Ukraine is is an “anti-Russia”.
Make no mistake though, there is absolutely no fear of the West in Russia. Most Russians believe that the Russian armed forces are more than enough to keep West in check. And they are quite correct. But there is this acute awareness that were in not for the Russian military, Russia would be treated just like Iraq.
In the meantime, the Russia media is gleefully feeding the Russian public every bit of russophobic propaganda produced in the West. Future generations will probably study this period and wonder at the absolutely mind-boggling stupidity of a western propaganda machine which is apparently completely oblivious at the impact of its propaganda on a nuclear superpower.
The Saker The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95 | 0 |
Whiten Your Face By Using One Ingredient Wrinkles Will Disappear Ξ [November 2, 2016] BLOG Would You Board the Titanic II? An Eerily Similar Replica of the Doomed Ship Will Set Sail in 2018 posted by Eddie This lavish replica of the ill-fated RMS Titanic is expected to set sail in 2018 – and it will look eerily similar to the most famous ship in the world that sank back in 1912.Staying true to its namesake, the Titanic II will feature Turkish baths, an Edwardian gym and a small swimming pool. Of course, it will also feature the grand staircase which remains one of its most famous features due to its prominence in the 1997 movie about the ship’s sinking.Like the “unsinkable” original, it will also have first, second and third class cabins and dining rooms, as well as a smoking room. With white panelling throughout, the first class dining room was nearly 115 feet long and spanned the entire width of the ship. Blue Star Line says that some of the elements will be retained purely for historic significance but will not be functional.Titanic II will be 13 feet wider than the original ship, but its length, height and weight will be similar, and it will also have nine decks like the original. First class cabins on board Titanic II will feature beds with curtains, wood paneling and his and hers sinks. It will meet modern safety and design requirements, meaning it will have a welded hull instead of a riveted one, a diesel-electric propulsion system instead of steam engines, stabilizers, and high-tech navigational equipment, reports the Daily Mail.And, of course, this time, it will have enough lifeboats for everyone on board – and evacuation systems put in place. Would you set sail on the Titanic II? Source: | 0 |
10 870 0 26 In den teilweise erschütternden Berichten geben die meist jungen Frauen zu Protokoll, wie sie in der Kölner Silvesternacht von Männern eingekreist, an Brüsten, zwischen den Beinen und am Gesäß angefasst wurden.
Die Tatverdächtigen – größtenteils junge Migranten aus Nordafrika – hätten sich wohl im Bereich um den Hauptbahnhof zum gemeinsamen Feiern verabredet, anders sei nicht zu erklären, warum sich über 1000 dieser jungen Männer gleichzeitig auf dem Platz befunden hätten, so der Kriminologe Prof. Dr. Rudolf Egg, der Aussagen von über 1000 Opfern analysiert hat. © REUTERS/ Benoit Tessier Nach sexuellen Übergriffen: „Wels darf nicht Köln werden“
Er gehe aber nicht davon aus, dass sie von vorn herein den Plan verfolgt hätten, Frauen sexuell zu belästigen. Nach einzelnen Vorfällen habe sich vielmehr eine Eigendynamik entwickelt. „Es hat sich wie ein Virus in der Gruppe der Männer verbreitet, sodass ganze Spaliere entstanden – dass man etwa die Brücke, die über den Rhein führt, und den Fußgängerweg blockiert hat und man dort gar nicht mehr passieren konnte“, stellte er in einem Interview für die Sputnik-Korrespondentin Ilona Pfeffer fest.
Die Einsatzkräfte der Polizei seien auf eine solche Situation nicht vorbereitet gewesen.
„Die Polizei hat die Lage unterschätzt. Man hat gemeint, mit einer geringen Stärke und mit dem Gewährenlassen von weniger schweren Straftaten die Sache im Griff zu behalten. Das hat hier nicht funktioniert. Die Situation war nur auf den ersten Blick so ähnlich, wie das, was man an Massenbewegungen am Rande eines Fußballspiels kennt oder von politischen Demonstrationen. Man hatte kein Vorbild, es gab kein vergleichbares Ereignis. Das hat dazu geführt, dass man von vornherein zu wenige Polizisten vor Ort hatte und diese auch nicht viel ausrichten konnten.“
Ähnlich sieht es Arnold Plickert, Stellvertretender Bundesvorsitzender der Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP): © AFP 2016/ DPA/Markus Boehm „Polizisten guckten und taten nichts“: Erkenntnisse zu Kölner Silvesternacht - Studie „Es war für keinen erkennbar, dass es zu Silvester zu solchen Erscheinungen kommt. Das geben übrigens auch die ersten Ergebnisse der SoKo in Köln wieder. Die meisten Personen, die wir als tatverdächtig ermittelt haben, waren erst seit drei bis vier Monaten in Deutschland. Es gab auch keine Absprachen, da hinzugehen, kein koordiniertes Vorgehen.“
In einigen Fällen habe man trotz Überforderung den Opfern helfen können, so Plickert gegenüber Sputnik. Eine große Zahl von Frauen hat aber laut dem Gutachten von Prof. Rudolf Egg von der Kriminologischen Zentralstelle in Wiesbaden auf ihre Notrufe hin keine adäquate Unterstützung durch die Beamten erhalten. „Bei der Anhörung im Landtag von NRW wurden auch Notrufe abgespielt, die Frauen und Männer abgegeben hatten, und es klang nicht so, als wenn man hochaufmerksam reagiert hätte. Da sagt eine Frau, sie sei begrapscht worden. Für sie ist es eine dramatische Situation und es heißt bloß„Bleiben Sie mal da, wir schicken jemanden vorbei.“ Das klingt, als wolle man die Person abwimmeln und würde sie nicht ernst nehmen.“ © AFP 2016/ Markus Boehm / dpa Auch direkt vor Ort angesprochene Polizisten hätten den Aussagen der Opfer zufolge die Frauen nicht ernst genommen und keine Hilfe geleistet.
Erklärungsversuche seitens des Polizeigewerkschafters: „Die Kollegen, die dort im Einsatz waren, haben eine äußerst schwierige Situation vorgefunden. Es waren von Anfang an viel zu wenige Kräfte da. Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass Kollegen mit anderen Aufgaben beschäftigt waren und gesagt haben: Ich kann jetzt nicht, gehen Sie zur nächsten Wache. Wenn aber eine Frau, wie es geschildert wurde, von mehreren Personen angegangen wurde, zu zwei Beamten gegangen wäre und die sich nicht gekümmert hätten, weggeguckt hätten, dann wäre das nicht akzeptabel. Man kann die Person nicht mit dem Gefühl stehen lassen: Hier kümmert sich keiner, es ist uninteressant, was ich erlitten habe.“
Statt eines aktiven Eingreifens seitens der Polizei sollen die Opfer mehrfach den Ratschlag bekommen haben, sich von den Stellen fernzuhalten, wo sie belästigt worden seien.
„Manchmal ist der Ratschlag, bestimmte Plätze zu meiden, so falsch nicht. Aber das kann nicht die Lösung des Problems sein. Man kann potentiellen Opfern nicht die Verantwortung dafür übertragen, dass nichts passiert. Die Politik und die Sicherheitsorgane müssen sich auf andere Weise darauf vorbereiten, denn die Schuld liegt nicht bei den Opfern, sondern bei den Tätern.“, kommentiert Egg.
Mindestens fraglich ist auch, warum die Polizei angesichts der aus der Kontrolle geratenen Situation keine Verstärkung angefordert hatte. Polizeigewerkschafter Plickert bestätigt, dass es für die Silvesternacht Sofortverstärkungskräfte gegeben hätte, aber die hätten erst aus anderen Behörden angefordert werden müssen und wären zu spät gekommen, um an der Lage in Köln etwas ausrichten zu können. © REUTERS/ Wolfgang Rattay Kölner Silvesternacht: Schrecken vieler Frauen wird zu Schreck für Frau Merkel „Um 22:30 hat es eine Besprechung mit dem Polizeiführer und dem Führer der Bundespolizei gegeben und man hat gemerkt, es läuft aus dem Ruder, und sich dazu entschlossen, den Platz zu räumen. Zu dem Zeitpunkt hätte es keinen Sinn mehr gemacht, eine Hundertschaft anzufordern, denn sie wäre erst gegen 1 Uhr da gewesen. Um 23:25 hat man mit der Räumung begonnen und diese ist auch relativ unproblematisch verlaufen.“
Nun gelte es, unter anderem in dem Untersuchungsausschuss im Düsseldorfer Landtag, der bereits 49 Sitzungen hinter sich hat, bei denen Zeugen und Gutachter gehört werden, das Geschehene zu analysieren und die richtigen Schlüsse daraus zu ziehen.
„Wir werden uns zukünftig einsatzmäßig anders aufstellen. Es wird ein gemeinsames Sicherheitskonzept mit der Stadt geben. An solchen Plätzen gibt es eine Videoüberwachung und ich gehe davon aus, dass in solchen Tagen auch die Räume besser ausgeleuchtet werden. Letztes Silvester waren wir mit 130 Landespolizisten in Köln eingesetzt, dieses Jahr gehe ich davon aus, dass wir mit 1000 Polizisten präsent sein werden. Ich glaube, alle Bundesländer werden sich in der kommenden Silvesternacht kräftemäßig besser aufstellen, weil alle diese Szenarien von Köln vor Augen haben“, sagt Polizeigewerkschafter Arnold Plickert.
Ilona Pfeffer | 0 |
Tesla Made More Money This Quarter Than All U.S. Oil Companies Made Last Year Nov 14, 2016 0 0
Signs of the times. This past quarter, Elon Musk’s Tesla company made a profit of $22 million, while the entire U.S. oil industry lost a total of $67 billion last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration . This is in part due to the global oil prices falling, as well as humanity’s awakening push for clean, renewable energy.
According to the Renewable Energy Institute , the price efficiency of solar technology will be better than fossil fuel by 2025 and will continue to get cheaper and cheaper until that time.
However, the newly elected President of the U.S. says that he wants to “lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.” Donald Trump also says he will initiate this action within his first 100 days of being in office.
While this action is certain to increase jobs for more Americans, we must also take into account the environmental impact this will have as even more carbon will be released into the atmosphere if these now dormant energy reserves begin to be tapped.
Additionally, the price of oil continues to remain low and even if jobs are created, there is no guarantee these companies in the fossil fuel industry will be able to profit financially.
The way the world is recognizing the necessity to move away from fossil fuels, as well as the increased technological capability, it appears as though Donald Trump will have a very difficult time putting this part of his plan into action.
Instead, he is likely to face a wave of opposition if he tries to implement such measures as people know that we can’t keep pumping even more carbon into the atmosphere if we want our world’s atmosphere to return to pristine condition.
Earlier this year, leaders from Russia, China, Japan and South Korea met to sign an agreement to begin working on a project called the Asian Super-Grid . The project will include wind and solar technologies and will power various parts of the world, including Europe, Southern Africa, South and Southeast Asia, as well as the four countries involved.
What we are seeing right now in our world is the writing on the wall: We see what destruction and pollution can come from the fossil fuel industry (as well as the political destruction that occurs through war to gain more oil resources from the Middle East) and we see that the solutions to these issues already exist.
We see more and more that the solutions are being put into place, and now on an even wider scale (Asian Super-Grid). We also are seeing the economic reality of either continuing down the old path of fossil fuels as well as the bright new path being forged with clean and sustainable energy.
2017 is going to be quite a year. We have the solutions, but will we implement them on a mass scale?
Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Health Science and does health coaching through his website Orgonlight Health . You can follow the Orgonlight Health facebook page or visit the website for more information and other inspiring articles. | 0 |
Is this really ISIS? No one yelled Allen's Snack Bar when the tank exploed. | 0 |
reports on What You Need to Know About the 'Alt Right' Get the New AMTV Coffee Cup Rogue Black... Now on Sale!! $9.99 AMTV https://goo.gl/XKnuWA | 0 |
October 28, 2016 @ 3:07 pm
Reports are coming in now of absentee ballots being stolen from mailboxes in Billings, Montana.
Bigger issue: FBI has now reopened their investigation into Hilloween’s emails! Have found new ones. My concern is, how is someone under federal investigation going to fulfill the duties of the office of the presidency? That person would be focusing on their defense, not the well being of the American People! How is someone barred from access to Highly Classified Information going to be able to act in the interest of our country? A successful impeachment would see Kaine elevated to the presidency! He must be sitting behind the scenes, rubbing his hands in eager anticipation!”My precious! My precious!” All those mindless bots who are voting for this ho, only doing so because they desire to see a woman president will be sorely disappointed to see that office ceded to Tim Kaine! Whatta joke! TRUMP/PENCE!! marlene October 28, 2016 @ 2:50 pm
I will consider the Constitution Party AFTER Donald Trump has served 8 years as President. When it comes to Congress, unfortunately my state does not allow 3rd parties to vote in the primary. If they did, I’d vote for the Constitution Party to give Trump a Congress he can work with. This also means that if I change to democrat, how can I vote out the democrats in Congress? And if I stay republican, it would be useless to vote them out as it would result in more democrats! My state SUCKS and has the worst rigged voting machines, soros-paid Election Commission criminals, and is a “swing” state. A ‘swing’ state is one where they swing your votes to the other candidate of THEIR choice. | 0 |
(Before It's News)
21st Century Wire says…
As western media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the BBC continue to hurl viral images of ‘child victims of Aleppo,’ western and gulf-backed terrorists in East Aleppo continue to fire mortars, ‘ hell cannon ‘ and use snipers to target civilians and children in government-protected West Aleppo. The level of information fraud and propaganda being perpetrated by the western mainstream media and politicians like John Kerry and Samantha Power is unprecedented – even by traditional low US standards.
RT International interveiws Syrian peace campaigner Mother Agnes-Mariam and independent researcher and journalist Vanessa Beeley . Watch:
.
RESEARCH LINKS:
Message from the REAL Syria Civil Defense to the White Helmets:
Letter from the REAL Syria Civil Defense to western governments and people
Exclusive investigative report by Vanessa Beeley:
The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake White Helmets as Terrorist-Linked Imposters
CrossTalk Panel Discussion: White Helmets, ‘A Pseudo NGO’:
CrossTalk: ‘White Helmets, Really?’ with Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett & Patrick Henningsen
A NOBEL LIE: CNN Claim Barrel Bomb Struck White Helmet Center in Damascus:
http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/10/08/more-lies-cnn-claim-white-helmets-center-hit-by-barrel-bomb-in-damascus/
NGO/Human Rights Charities investigation by Patrick Henningsen:
AN INTRODUCTION: Smart Power & The Human Rights Industrial Complex
Open Letter by Vanessa Beeley:
White Helmets Campaign for War NOT Peace – Retract RLA & Nobel Peace Prize Nominations
Jeremy Salt: How West Are Deceiving the World Over Syria
“No Longer Just a Syrian War but an Existential Contest Between the US and Russia”
Staged Rescue Videos:
(VIDEO) White Helmets: Miraculous ‘Rag Doll Rescue’
White Helmets Recycling ‘Child Victim’ Images for Western Propaganda:
RESCUE REDUX: Are Syria’s White Helmets ‘Recycling’ its Child Victims?
21WIRE compilation of key information on the White Helmets:
Who are the Syria White Helmets?
21WIRE Investigative Report on the White Helmets’ Terrorist Connections:
Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception ~ the “Moderate” Executioners
Cory Morningstar report on White Helmets, NGOs:
Investigation into the funding sources of the White Helmets, Avaaz, Purpose, The Syria Campaign
White Helmets Report by former Weapons Scott Ritter:
The ‘White Helmets’ and the Inherent Contradiction of America’s Syria Policy
Open letter to Canada’s NDP Leader on White Helmets’ Nobel Prize Nomination:
Letter to NDP from Prof. John Ryan protesting White Helmet nomination for RLA and Nobel Peace Prize
REPORT: ‘Aleppo Media Centre’ Funded By French Foreign Office, EU and US:
http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/09/20/exclusive-aleppo-media-centre-funded-by-french-foreign-office-eu-and-us/
White Helmets – Bogus Claims:
‘We Saved 60,000’ – Bogus Claim by Syria’s White Helmets Raises Even More Questions
Tony Cartalucci report on the White Helmets and Staged Rescue Scenes:
Save Aleppo” Protest Proves How Easy it is to Dress Up Actors as “War Victims”
READ MORE WHITE HELMET NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire White Helmet Files
SUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV
21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump has relaxed some of the rules for preventing civilian casualties when the American military carries out counterterrorism strikes in Somalia, laying the groundwork for an escalating campaign against Islamist militants in the Horn of Africa. The decision, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations, gives commanders at the United States Africa Command greater latitude to carry out offensive airstrikes and raids by ground troops against militants with the Islamist group Shabab. That sets the stage for an intensified pace of combat there, while increasing the risk that American forces could kill civilians. Mr. Trump signed a directive on Wednesday declaring parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities,” where targeting rules will apply for at least 180 days, the officials said. The New York Times reported the Pentagon’s request for the expanded targeting authority on March 12, and Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the top officer at Africa Command, publicly acknowledged that he was seeking it at a news conference last Friday. “It’s very important and very helpful for us to have little more flexibility, a little bit more timeliness, in terms of process,” General Waldhauser said. “It allows us to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion. ” In a statement issued several hours after The New York Times first published news of the directive, Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, acknowledged that Mr. Trump had approved the Pentagon’s proposal to expand its targeting authority “to defeat Al Shabab in Somalia” in partnership with African Union and Somali forces. “The additional support provided by this authority will help deny Al Shabab safe havens from which it could attack U. S. citizens or U. S. interests in the region,” he said. Previously, to carry out an airstrike or ground raid in Somalia, the military was generally required to follow standards that President Barack Obama imposed in 2013 for counterterrorism strikes away from conventional war zones, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those rules, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, required interagency vetting of proposed strikes. They also said that the target must pose a threat to Americans and that there must be that no civilian bystanders would die. Under the new guidelines, Africa Command may treat Somalia under battlefield rules: Without interagency vetting, commanders may strike people thought to be Shabab fighters based only on that status, without any reason to think that the individual target poses a particular and specific threat to Americans. In addition, some civilian bystander deaths would be permitted if deemed necessary and proportionate. Mr. Trump’s decision to exempt much of Somalia from the 2013 rules follows a similar decision he made for parts of Yemen shortly after taking office. The new directive for Somalia is another example of how the American military is accelerating the ways it carries out combat missions under the Trump administration, reducing constraints on the use of force imposed by the Obama administration. As the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has recently moved into the city of Mosul, civilian casualties have spiked. One American strike on March 17 may have killed scores of civilians, and human rights groups have questioned whether the rules of engagement were to blame. While American commanders say the formal rules of engagement have not changed in Iraq, they acknowledge that the system for calling in airstrikes there has been accelerated. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, said on Wednesday that the new procedures made it easier for commanders in the field to call in airstrikes without waiting for permission from more senior officers. The loosening of the rules in Somalia comes against the backdrop of a broader, continuing Trump administration policy review about whether to scrap the 2013 rules altogether. The decision was described by officials familiar with the new directive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military planning. Luke Hartig, a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, said greater action could be helpful in dealing with a threat, pointing to the Obama administration’s decision last year to temporarily declare the region around Surt, Libya, an zone. That decision similarly permitted airstrikes that helped Libyan forces root out Islamic State militants. But it also increases certain risks, he said. “The downside is you risk potentially greater civilian casualties or potentially killing militants who are not part of our enemy,” Mr. Hartig said. He warned that such deaths could make local partners turn against the United States and fuel terrorist recruitment. Mr. Trump’s decision to relax targeting limits in Somalia comes at a time of famine, which has increased the frequency of groups of people moving around, often while armed, in search of food and water — increasing the risk of mistaking civilians as Islamist fighters. General Waldhauser said at the news conference that Africa Command had “ ” the “significant” issues raised by that factor. “It’s our responsibility to make sure that we don’t have any catastrophes and we don’t take out a group of people who is moving to find water or food,” he said. “So, we are very, very conscious of that. ” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis first presented the proposal to relax targeting limits in Somalia at a dinner with Mr. Trump about five days after his inauguration, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations. At that same dinner, Mr. Mattis also presented proposals to similarly remove swaths of Yemen from the targeting limits and carry out a raid against Yemen’s Qaeda branch. Mr. Trump, the officials said, immediately approved the two proposals for Yemen, while the National Security Council began reviewing the Somalia proposal. The review for Somalia was slowed, officials have said, by criticism of the raid in Yemen, which resulted in numerous civilian deaths, the death of a member of the Navy SEALs and the loss of a $75 million aircraft. Still, the Central Command, which oversees military operations in Yemen, has carried out a fierce campaign of airstrikes in Yemen. The United States’ campaign against the Shabab in Somalia has been expanding over the last several years. That Islamist group is complex, with some factions focused on controlling Somalia, while others want to participate in external terrorist operations in line with Al Qaeda’s global war. In 2013, the group carried out the attack at the Westgate mall, in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed more than 60 people and wounded more than 175. Since then, it has adopted more sophisticated forms of terrorism, including nearly bringing down a Somali airliner in February with a bomb hidden in a laptop computer. To counter the Shabab, the United States has increasingly used Special Operations forces, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies. Hundreds of American troops now rotate through makeshift bases in Somalia, the largest military presence since the United States pulled out of the country after the “Black Hawk Down” battle in 1993. They have served as trainers and advisers to African Union and Somali government forces, and have sometimes participated directly in combat. Against that backdrop, Mr. Trump’s escalation is less a break with his predecessor than an intensification of a trend that dates to Mr. Obama’s last year in power. Last year, the Obama White House permitted the military to increase airstrikes in Somalia without always going through the vetting process detailed in the 2013 rules. Instead, the military justified some strikes under an expansive interpretation of an exception for “ ” — including some that defended partner forces combating the Shabab even if no Americans were under direct threat. And as The Times reported in November, the Obama administration — after years of internal debate — decided to designate the Shabab an “associated force” of Al Qaeda. That shored up the executive branch’s authority to wage war in Somalia by bringing the Shabab under Congress’s authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Even before the new relaxations of the rules, 200 to 300 American Special Operations forces have been working with soldiers from Somalia and other African nations like Kenya and Uganda to carry out more than a raids every month, according to senior American military officials. The Navy’s classified SEAL Team 6 has been heavily involved in many of these operations. The Pentagon has acknowledged only a fraction of these missions. But even the publicly available information shows a marked increase in recent years. The Pentagon announced 13 ground raids and airstrikes in 2016, up from five in 2015, according to data compiled by New America, a Washington think tank. Those strikes killed about 25 civilians and 200 people suspected of being militants, the group found. | 1 |
Email
Hillary Clinton and her close cohorts are not the only ones whose corruption and lies have been revealed by the Podesta e-mails published by WikiLeaks. The e-mails also document that — his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding — President Obama lied to the American people when he claimed that he had been unaware of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, unsecured e-mail server which she used to conduct official State business, including both sending and receiving classified information.
In a pre-recorded interview aired on CBS on March 8, 2015, the president said he had learned of Clinton’s server “through news reports” and that he learned of it “the same time everybody else” did. Of course, that was not true, since he had exchanged e-mails with Clinton while she was secretary of state and the e-mail address would clearly have been her private address instead of the state.gov address she should have been using.
The day after the interview aired on CBS, the White House tried to walk back the president’s remarks. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was asked in a press briefing , “We heard from the President in his interview with CBS about this and he said that he first became aware of it in the reports last week. So I’m wondering if, implicit in that, is that the President and Secretary Clinton never emailed one another when Secretary Clinton was serving at the State Department.” He answered by saying: That may be one conclusion to draw from the President’s remarks, but it would not be an accurate one. The President, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his Secretary of State. I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email one another. And the point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address — he did — but he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.
Earnest was then asked a follow-up question about the specific e-mail address Clinton was using when she and the president exchanged messages. The question, as recorded in the transcript of that briefing, was, “Just to drill down on that a little bit, does that mean that he didn’t know that he was emailing whatever it was, like, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , or that...” Earnest cut off the question to say: Well, again, I’m not going to get into a lot of detail here, but I’m not going to — the point is the President did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back to. But, again, the question here is about compliance with the Federal Records Act. And understandably, the kinds of things that a President and his Secretary of State talk about are pretty weighty, national issues. I’m not sure that they drilled all the way down to the Federal Records Act. But what is clear is that, as the President said in his interview, the emails that he sends are properly maintained, consistent with the Presidential Records Act — and that, by the way, would be true of any emails that he received from his Secretary of State. And the reason I raise that is because Secretary Clinton’s team has pointed out, rightfully so, that a large number of the emails that they provided to the State Department in response to a request from her personal email system were already maintained on the State Department agency system. And the reason for that is she was emailing people with — State Department employees with state.gov email addresses, which meant that those email communications had been properly preserved and maintained. The last thing I’ll say about this is that what we know also is that the whole purpose of maintaining these records is to ensure that they can be properly used in responding to legitimate questions and inquiries from Congress and from the public. And I understand that hundreds of documents have already been provided to Congress consistent with their specific request out of these records.
It’s interesting that within hours of the president’s remarks being broadcast, the White House was already prepared to spin what he had said and try to make it sound like he did not claim that he had first learned of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server and account “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”
Remember that the CBS interview was pre-recorded. What is now known — because of the Podesta e-mails published by WikiLeaks — is that in the day between that recording and the press briefing at the White House (even before the interview aired), Team Clinton was already working on how to “clean this up.”
At 6:33 p.m. on March 7, the day before the CBS interview was seen by the American people, Josh Schwerin, a spokesperson for the Clinton campaign, sent an e-mail to Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for the campaign, and Kristina Schake, deputy communications director for the campaign, and others. He drew Palmieri’s attention to the problem of the president’s remarks: *From:* Josh Schwerin < This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > *Date:* March 7, 2015 at 6:33:44 PM EST *To:* Jennifer Palmieri < This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >, Kristina Schake < This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >, Nick Merrill < This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >, Jesse Ferguson < This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > *Subject:* *POTUS on HRC emails* https://twitter.com/katherinemiller/status/574350749280432129/photo/1 Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news. -- Josh Schwerin
The e-mail resulted in a reply from Cheryl Mills, who received a forward of the e-mail at 6:39 p.m. She replied at 9:41 p.m. in a forward to John Podesta: From: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. To: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Date: 2015-03-07 21:41 Subject: Fwd: POTUS on HRC emails we need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov
So, in just over three hours, Team Clinton had verified that Hillary Clinton had e-mailed the president from her private, unsecured server and Cheryl Mills had set into motion an effort to “clean this up.” The interview aired the next day, and by the following day Josh Earnest held the press briefing in which he was already prepared to eat the president’s words and regurgitate something else. That is efficiency.
If nothing else, the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Podesta e-mails is revealing the collusion and corruption that are part and parcel of the way things are done in Washington. The president attempted to distance himself from the Clinton e-mail scandal by telling the American people a lie. That lie was that he did not know about her private server before the media reported on it. Team Clinton went to work to “clean this up” and made a point of the fact that “he has e-mails from her” which “do not say state.gov” and the next thing you know, the White House is ready to admit that the president knew all along about the server, and — Gosh! We hope the president’s words weren’t taken the wrong way — all the president meant to say was that he is careful to obey the law where e-mail and record-keeping are concerned, and he assumed the same of Secretary Clinton. Photo: AP Images Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
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12 0 0 2 (Taksim Square - Gezi Park Protests, İstanbul. Credit: Alan Hilditch / flickr)
Democracy grants people the right to protest, to show their opinion on matters that affect their lives and their nation’s. Protesting is a universally acknowledged fact belonging to the modern world. It serves to give voice to those who are disturbed by the faulty policies, drawbacks and negligence of their governments and who wish to raise public awareness on these matters. Demonstrations, rallies, strikes, pickets, boycotts and so on are all ways of protesting. As long as they are within the limits defined by the “law,” protests and acts of similar nature are in essence an indisputable part of democracy, freedom of opinion and expression.
However, in some cases protesting is exploited and used as a means of opposing democracy itself. Protests that give way to riots are now methods of staging coups to shut down administrations and overthrow democratically elected governments.
Legitimacy of Protests and Feasibility of Demands
Democratic protests are welcomed by societies and addressed by governments to the extent that their demands are tangible, justified and feasible . Protests lacking those qualities are most likely to fail in having their demands met.
The anti-government movement in Bulgaria in 2013-14 confirmed the validity of these qualities. The protests took place in three separate cycles. January and February witnessed rallies that objected to the high prices of electricity and demanded the government resign. They were successful as the requests were sensible. A later demonstration was against a government officer, and resulted in his resignation. Yet another cycle of protests called for a change of the system, along with some other illegal demands and faced defeat after turning into riots that were not supported by the overall society.
MORE... Gruesome Video Shows Turkish Soldiers Execute Female Kurdish PKK Fighters by Shooting in Their Heads 2 bombers, stopped by police, blew themselves up in Turkey Dispute over Kurds and Coup attempt threatens U.S.-Turkey alliance The attempted coup d’état made Turkey band together The Gezi Park protests in Turkey in the same year followed the same pattern. Set in motion with a good willed and environmentalist approach, it was likely to succeed considering its solid and feasible calls and legitimate ways at first. The government heeded the nature lovers’ voices and took a positive step by postponing a construction project that required the destruction of Gezi Park. Yet the humanist approach of young people changed course in the wake of provocations of separatist and terrorist gangs and turned into a totally different nature. Demonstrations that began in Gezi Park in Istanbul and that demanded the preservation of Gezi Park as a recreational area spread to other cities of the country and transformed into armed and bloody uprising imposing the fall of government. It was a quite clear coup d’etat attempt that did not refrain from using violent methods and openly rejected the validity of a democratically elected government. The protests were contradictory considering people took to streets using their democratic rights, but then appealed to non-democratic methods to lay their claims ignoring the will of the nation.
Though justified at the beginning, these two cases of protests demonstrate that they are open to hostile manipulations and may lose their legitimacy if left at the hands of ill-minded people. Recently some dark powers have been using this latest technique to manage countries’ internal affairs as they see fit and stage coups to overthrow governments. They bring in professional teams of brutal killers amidst peaceful protests, which then lead to violent anti-democratic clashes. These protests sometimes end up in civil wars where fellows of the same nation kill one another. It all happens in the wake of a government’s non-yielding to some dark power’s demands and a democratically elected government faces anti-democratic attempts.
Methods of Provocations and OTPOR
Such dramatic outcomes come by the employment of social media. Social media becomes an instrument for organizing, stirring and agitating the masses that are presumed to join the demonstrations. Various provocative organizations undertake the organization of some agents and provocateurs who take part in demonstrations by inciting them to get violent. These illegal “subcontractors” organize the public relations part of the riots and channel intellectual circles of the country such as its authors, academicians, journalists and members of non-governmental institutions to act against democratically elected government in the name of democracy and to lead the public.
One of the most common groups among these “ professional revolutionary organizations ” is a Serbia-based resistance organization,OTPOR . Independent observers state that OTPOR organizes coup attempts and civil disturbance by providing training and logistic support for the US-backed dissident organizations in many countries such as the former Yugoslavia, Serbia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey. There is a consensus that the CIA has been creating riots and social disturbances in fifty countries OTPOR its offshoot CANVAS…
A relevant source puts forward the following interesting findings OTPOR :
The (OTPOR 's ) fist-logo, would turn up 11 years later in the streets of Cairo , illustrating further the preposterous, foreign-backed nature of the Egyptian uprisings... Serbia’s OTPOR would continue receiving funds from the West and become a “CIA-coup college” of sorts under the name of CANVAS (Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies ).
The research article penned by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn and published on “Occupy.com” deals with the international financial, intelligence and political connections of OTPOR and features the following information based on WikiLeaks documents:
Serbia’s Srdja Popovic is known by many as a leading architect of regime changes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere since the late-1990s , and as one of the co-founders of OTPOR… Popovic and OTPOR's offshoot CANVAS have also maintained close ties with a Goldman Sachs executive and the private intelligence firm Stratfor as well as the U.S. government …
Such examples are easy to find. The internal public opinion on OTPOR is that it is being employed as leverage to overthrow those governments which conflict with the interests of the U.S. No wonder some media organizations that act on behalf of the US administration speak highly of OTPOR at every turn. Moreover, the British media rigorously advocates that the executives of OTPOR have nothing to do with the organization of coups.
Likewise, some Turkish media organizations disseminated similar statements during the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. The attempt to occupy the Prime Minister’s residence by armed groups, which is an act of rebellion against the state and treason by law, was orchestrated by OTPOR, according to reports. Yet the media deliberately defined it as “the exercise of legitimate, democratic rights, and freedom of expression by the people,” and thus desired to create misapprehension to display the members of the Marxist and separatist terrorist organizations who are far from representing even a slightest portion of the nation as the representatives of the nation. These media organs called the nation’s security forces who risked their lives to preserve public order and people’s lives as ‘the so-called enemies of freedom and democracy.’
In truth, such mass demonstrations that aim to topple governments, divide countries and organize bloody conflicts - and even civil wars - can no longer be called innocent rallies, but subtle projects of deep states and shadow organizations to take over countries from within. | 0 |
https://twitter.com/eric_braverman 7. On Doug Band of the Foundation: He was the CEO of Teneo, a global advisory firm which allowed him to mix Clinton donors, foreign companies with Clinton’s work as Secretary of State. Huma Abedin was a paid advisor to the company. The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the alliance between Abedin, Teneo, and the Clinton Foundation aides. There are many articles online saying Braverman had fled to the Russian Embassy in New York asking for asylum, but I do not feel comfortable with stating that as a FACT now.
Now, new WikiLeaks emails reveal additional details behind the the man, Eric Braverman, who was brought in as CEO by Chelsea to change the controversial practices of the Foundation but abruptly resigned a short time later after being pushed out by long-time Clinton loyalists who had apparently grown very comfortable with the status quo. Below is the new email exchange which begins when Neera Tanden warns John Podesta to “keep tabs on Doug Band” who she assumed was the insider who told NBC to “follow the money and find the real HRC scandal.” Interestingly, John Podesta writes back quickly to identify the real source as former Clinton Foundation CEO Eric Braverman which seems to be shocking to Tanden who replies simply, “Holy Moses.”
Posted October 25th, 2016 by Iron Mike CAUTION: Since we can’t trust the media, we report this story from non-mainstream sources …. Eric Braverman – a Yale lawyer – was brought into the Clinton Foundation “to clean it up” . His salary in 2015 was $395K plus bonuses. Of course the Clintons didn’t really want it cleaned up, – just to LOOK cleaned up …. Braverman was dumped after 2 years.
http://rabidrepublicanblog.com/is-eric-braverman-terrified-for-his-life/
Eric Braverman was chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation from 2013 to 2015. At the Foundation, Braverman led an effort to help ensure long-term sustainability – securing an endowment, transforming the organization’s use of data, establishing governance practices to reflect changing laws and public expectations, consolidating entities, and creating professional development for staff. Previously, Braverman served as a partner at McKinsey & Company, where he advised leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors on strategy, organization, and operations. Named by Fortune magazine in 2010 as one of the “40 Most Influential Leaders in Business” worldwide under 40 years old, Braverman co-founded McKinsey’s public sector practice and directed its work on government innovation globally. He also served as an advisor on performance management and technology for President Obama’s transition team in 2008. | 0 |
Two idiots need dates they get them. That’s about all you need to know about the aggressively stupid “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” a comedy about a pair of imbeciles who are best understood as representations of the enduring, contempt that some moviemakers have always had for their audiences. Witless, soulless, often amateurish and filled with product placements (nice going, Coors) the movie has nothing going for it other than some wasted talent. I hope that the most egregiously squandered — the Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick, as well as the character actors Stephen Root and Sam Richardson — were well paid. Somebody needs to come out of this mess ahead. The story is immaterial, and boilerplate. Adam Devine plays Mike Zac Efron plays his brother, Dave. Their parents — knowing that their sons tend to ruin family events with their unfunny, often dangerous (in one flashback, they send their grandfather to the grave) — insist that they bring dates to their sister’s nuptials. The brothers put an ad on Craigslist, which is where Ms. Plaza and Ms. Kendrick come in. Anonymously directed by Jake Szymanski, what follows isn’t really a story, just a succession of thuddingly leaden, patchily strung together bits in service to the underlying theme: Mike and Dave’s fear of sexualized women. Oh, there’s also a racist joke pegged to the singer Seal. You could see “Mike and Dave” as the latest manifestation of white heterosexual male panic run amok. A throwaway line about heteronormativity (I’m sure I heard that right) suggests that someone behind the scenes would like viewers to believe that there’s a degree of to all the desperation and yuks about booze, babes and bros. Perhaps there is whatever. But token reflexivity never got anyone off the hook. It certainly doesn’t obscure the more resonant if completely predictable truth that the movie evinces a profoundly troglodytic worldview toward women. And while that says a lot about Mike and Dave, it says even more about the industry that made this movie. “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It’s bad for your brain. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. | 1 |
Share This: B y ANDREW COCKBURN T he intrusion of the FBI into the 2016 presidential election may have come as a shock to most people, but it should not have surprised anyone who has spent time in the Oval Office. Stretching back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, presidents have learned, sooner or later, that while they may revel in the title of “Chief Executive,” their command of coercive bureaucracies, such as the FBI and the intelligence agencies, along with the military services, and others, is limited at best. ABOVE: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover succeeded in holding power for life by bribing politicians with his knowledge of their sins and crimes. He himself was a reactionary and closet gay man. At worst, presidents may find these powerful institutions actively colluding with their political enemies. Currently, we have credible reports of agents in the New York FBI Field Office defying their nominal superiors in the justice department to dig with zeal into the Clinton Foundation on the basis of nebulous leads from a partisan and largely discredited screed by a former Bush speechwriter. Richard Nixon would have found this a familiar scenario. Early in his presidency, he came to appreciate how little control he exerted over the assorted fiefdoms of the intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies. His solution was to set up a whole new police agency with extraordinary powers, the Drug Enforcement Administration, using the cover of a war on drugs, that would be under his direct control. Recognizing this for the threat it was, the entrenched institutions struck back, crippling Nixon with media leaks, notably those from “Deep Throat”, deputy FBI director Mark Felt. Sometimes the hobbling of executive power may emanate not from widely recognized instruments of power, such as the FBI, but from more obscure but nonetheless potent corners of the enforcement universe. Thus the Obama Administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, the agreement to limit Iran’s uranium enrichment program, is currently being actively undermined by a little-known branch of the U.S. Treasury, OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which supervises the enforcement of US sanctions around the world. Under the agreement hammered out by Secretary of State John Kerry in July 2015, Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in return for the lifting of an array of economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other western powers in recent years. The most onerous of these controls were those enjoining banks from doing business with nominated Iranian banks and other entities, with savage penalties levied on anyone who infringed the rules. The effect has been to deter international banks from doing any business of any kind with Iranian banks, for fear of inadvertently triggering a billion dollar fine from the U.S. sanctions police. Recognizing that the Iranians might lose faith in the agreement if promised rewards from the ability to trade freely with the rest of the world do not appear, the Obama Administration has taken steps to remedy the situation, or thinks it has. Speaking recently at a ceremony in London honoring his role in negotiating the deal, Kerry announced that so long as banks make a pro forma effort to ensure they were not dealing with a sanctioned institution (there are still plenty of those) OFAC would not penalize them even if it turned out they were wrong. “OFAC… has made it very, very clear that if you do due diligence in the normal fashion,” said Kerry, “and later it turns out it was some unenforceable entity that pops up, you will not be held accountable for that.” Except that OFAC has different ideas. As detailed by attorney Tyler Cullis, a specialist in sanctions regulations, writing in the blog SanctionLaw, OFAC states on its own website that the “normal” due diligence cited by Kerry is absolutely not “necessarily sufficient.” Instead, Treasury’s Acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam Szubin, OFAC’s boss, has made it clear that anyone doing banking business with Iran had better exercise “ enhanced (my emphasis) due diligence,” essentially meaning they have to prove their counterparties are pure as the driven snow, or they will get it in the neck. The consequences are predictable; international banks will deem it smart to pay attention to the sanctions cops rather than the diplomat and steer clear of Iranian business, with consequent disillusionment over the deal in Iran and the neutralizing of a key administration success. As Nixon might have said, par for the course. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine . An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years. In addition to publishing numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis American Casino . His latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (Henry Holt). Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. 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Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former Obama administration Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that although he was “concerned” about President Donald Trump’s tweets, he believed Trump has the potential to be a “great president. ” “I actually believe that Donald Trump — and I told him this when I met with him in December,” he said. “I actually believe Donald Trump has the potential to be a great president in sort of the Nixon goes to China way or Reagan goes to the Soviet Union way. If he can find a way to rein in some of — some of the more unhealthy impulses, listen to his staff, bring on a full complement of political appointees who will help him govern. ” “And I’m very concerned about the tweets, obviously,” Johnson continued. “And very concerned about the direction we’re taking in a lot of — in a lot of national security areas. I’m concerned that we’re — when it comes to Homeland Security, we may be fighting the last war. We may be responding to the terrorist attack of ten years ago versus the next one. I used to tell my people, don’t respond to the last terrorist attack, prepare for the next one. And given where we are right now with the current threat environment, we need to focus on violent extremist, which is something we did a lot of in the last administration. Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
Some migrants coming into Western states as Syrian asylum seekers are “definitely” terrorists, the Syrian President Bashar has said. [Terrorists pictured on the internet “holding machine guns or killing people” have since turned up in photographs of “peaceful refugees in Europe or the West” President Assad told Yahoo News, adding: “That’s true. ” But he declined to put a figure on how many of the 4. 8 million asylum seekers might be terrorists, saying “nobody has any number. Nobody knows. Because nobody knows all the terrorists. ” He also declined to say whether the figure might be “significant” highlighting that it took only 15 people to bring down the Twin Towers on . “It’s not about significant because you don’t need a significant number to commit atrocities,” he said. “It’s not about the number, it’s about the quality — it’s about the intentions. ” Speaking in his presidential office in Damascus, Syria, Assad would not take a view on whether the U. S. was right to halt the immigration of migrants from seven countries which posed a security threat, Syria included, but said that his priority was rather to ensure that Syrian asylum seekers return home. “For me, the priority is to bring those citizens to their country, not to help them immigrate,” he said. The interview was released as the British prime minister, Theresa May, defended government schemes to resettle 20, 000 Syrians in the UK over five years. At a Downing Street press conference, May told reporters: ‘We have been seeing quite a number of children and families being resettled here in the United Kingdom. “I think what we are doing in terms of refugees is absolutely right, on top of course of the significant financial support and humanitarian aid we are giving to refugees in the region of Syria — a commitment of £2. 3 billion, the second biggest bilateral donor. ” In the last few days, the government has come under fire for ending a scheme to bring child migrants from Calais into Britain. Announcing the decision, immigration minister Robert Goodwill told MPs that 200 children had been placed around the country and that councils had indicated they had the capacity for only 150 more. But the Archbishop of Canterbury slammed the move, calling on the government to take in nearly ten times as many children. He added: “I fear that this week’s decision does not meet the spirit of commitment that was given during the passage of the Immigration Act last year. ” | 1 |
There was a time in the middle of the last century when children in certain quarters of the Bronx and Brooklyn were often asked to entertain guests with a song called “Miami Beach Rhumba,” an improbable combination of zesty Latin dance rhythms and musical inflections born of the shtetls and ghettos of Eastern Europe. The composer of that song was Irving Fields, who died on Saturday at 101 at his home in Manhattan, and his career was as improbable as his songs. In his younger days, Mr. Fields specialized in Latinizing standards. He and a trio started with an album for Decca Records called “Bagels and Bongos,” which whimsically transformed melancholy Yiddish chestnuts like “Raisins and Almonds” and “My Yiddishe Momme” into or mambos. When the album sold tens of thousands of copies, he recorded a sequel and then moved on to Latinizing Italian standards (“Pizza and Bongos”) Hawaiian melodies (“Bikinis and Bongos”) and French songs (“Champagne and Bongos”). He also composed songs, the most famous of which was “Miami Beach Rhumba,” a 1946 number about a traveler who starts out for Havana and ends up in the Jewish Riviera of the song’s title. With lyrics by Albert Gamse — “I’ll save Havana for mañana” was one line — it became a staple of 1950s and ’60s bar mitzvahs. The Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat turned it into a hit in 1947, and Tito Puente recorded it as well. Fifty years later, Woody Allen used it in his film “Deconstructing Harry. ” (John Camacho is also credited with a hand in the composing.) Other Fields collaborations included “Managua, Nicaragua,” a hit for Guy Lombardo, and “Chantez, Chantez,” a sprightly melody that Dinah Shore recorded in 1957. Yet in the last decades of his life he was better known as a New York City lounge pianist, still performing as recently as March at spots near his Central Park South home, like the dining room of the Park Lane Hotel, the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel and Nino’s Tuscany Steakhouse. Though he sometimes played to rooms or ones with distracted customers, he was a restless man who could not stop working. “I love what I do, and the piano is my best friend,” he told an interviewer. Though depending on a walker to get around, his fingers hobbled by arthritis, he continued to find his way to the keyboard, stylish in a blue blazer and pocket square, his customary vodka martini perched on top of the piano. (He also liked to keep a pile of fliers there, with titles like “Secrets for Longevity” and tips like “Eat four hours before bedtime (you’ll digest better). ”) Mr. Fields could play almost any request, especially if it was for a Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers or Porter tune. If a woman said she was from Texas, he would run off a medley that might start with “The Yellow Rose of Texas. ” “People ask me, ‘How do you remember so many notes? ’” he once said. “It just comes to me. It’s like God is in my mind. ” He even became something of a phenomenon among the internet generation, when, by his account, at a fan’s request, he took 15 minutes to compose “YouTube Dot Com Theme Song. ” It has had close to 900, 000 views. Mr. Fields was born Yitzhak Schwartz on Aug. 4, 1915, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the youngest of six children (all of whom lived into their 90s). He grew up there and in Coney Island and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. His father, Max, a carpenter who sang in local choirs, was from Pinsk in Belarus, and his mother, Eva, was from Minsk, also in Belarus he once wrote a song playing with the cities’ rhyming names. Pressured to start taking piano lessons at 8 years old, he found repeating scales monotonous but later credited the exercises with sharpening his playing and making it seem more casual. He also sang in a choir behind the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, and began pecking out popular songs and Yiddish vaudeville tunes. While still a teenager, he put together a band that was hired to play parties. He also took piano jobs on cruise ships headed for Havana and San Juan, engendering a passion for Latin music. Mr. Fields and groups of various sizes played the Manhattan clubs that were a hallmark of swank 1940s and ‘50s night life, places like the Copacabana, the Latin Quarter, El Morocco and the Mermaid Room. He remembered Ava Gardner dancing barefoot to his Latin songs and Edward G. Robinson asking him to play Viennese waltzes. As television infiltrated more American households, he appeared on shows hosted by Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason and Kate Smith. In his telling, his lounge career had many origins. In one story, the hotelier Leona Helmsley, who had heard him play “I’m Just Wild About Harry” — she had been married to the real estate magnate Harry Helmsley — told him, “I’ll break your fingers if you don’t become my house pianist. ” He soon began playing the Park Lane. Mr. Fields is survived by his wife, Ruth, who confirmed his death, along with a son, Mark a daughter, Diane Shaffran a stepdaughter, Penny Dechowitz a stepson, Peter Dechowitz seven grandchildren and two . He and Ruth, 14 years his junior, lived for the last half century in a tidy apartment that did not have a piano. On those occasions when he needed to play for a visitor, as he did when a New York Times reporter showed up in May 2015, he would take an elevator upstairs to a neighbor’s apartment. “You think I need to practice — at my age?” he said. | 1 |
During CNN’s coverage of Donald Trump’s press conference on Wednesday, anchor Jake Tapper stated that it was “irresponsible” of Buzzfeed “to put uncorroborated information on the Internet. I can understand why Trump would be upset about that. I would be upset about it too. It’s why we did not publish it, and why we did not detail any specifics from it, because it was uncorroborated, and that’s not what we do. ” Tapper said, “At the beginning of the press conference, Sean Spicer, who’s going to be the White House Press Secretary, suggested that both Buzzfeed and CNN published this dossier full of uncorroborated rumors. That’s not true. That’s false. CNN never did that. We never provided even one detail from that dossier, except this morning when I said, that there was reason to believe that one detail that had been out there because of Buzzfeed was false, involving Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen. So, that conflation whether it’s because Sean Spicer misunderstood, or some other reason, that’s not true. CNN did not do that. ” He continued, “What we did was, say, in our reporting yesterday that broke the story, that the intelligence chiefs — intelligence chiefs of the United States when they briefed President Obama Thursday and Trump on Friday, provided, in their briefing to these two leaders about Russian into the US 2016 election, two pages of a synopsis, and the synopsis was, in part, based on information in that dossier that was uncorroborated and the intelligence chiefs had not yet run to ground, but they believed that the source of the dossier was credible and his sources were credible. And they believed that: A. The and the president should know that the Russians were claiming they had compromising information on him, and two, that the Russians were claiming that there were contacts between the Trump camp or Trump orbit and the Russian government or the Russian orbit during the campaign. And that information was provided. No one has disputed that that dossier was in the presentation, and that — I’m sorry that synopsis was in the presentation by the intelligence chiefs to Trump, to President Obama. We have been asking now, for more than half a day, for several, several hours before we went with the story, for a comment from the Trump campaign. ” Tapper further stated, “And when Mr. Trump went after our own Jim Acosta, saying he’s fake news and he isn’t going to call for him, what I suspect we are seeing here is an attempt to discredit legitimate, responsible attempts to report on this incoming administration with irresponsible journalism that hurts us all, and the media going forward should keep that in mind. So, that’s one, just to get that out of the way. ” Tapper concluded by saying of Buzzfeed’s story, “It’s irresponsible to put uncorroborated information on the Internet. I can understand why Trump would be upset about that. I would be upset about it too. It’s why we did not publish it, and why we did not detail any specifics from it, because it was uncorroborated, and that’s not what we do. We are in the business of sussing out what is true and what is false. ” ( Real Clear Politics) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
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by Jason DeWitt | Top Right News
Things just went from bad to much worse for Hillary Clinton as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) expands its investigation of the corrupt Clinton Foundation.
Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier reported stunning developments about the Foundation investigation from two sources inside the FBI — including that an “indictment” is “likely” is the case.
Baier reveals five important new pieces of information in these two short clips.
The details:
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told Baier that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information have been taken from it.
Transcript:
BRET BAIER: Breaking news tonight — two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation tell Fox the following:
The investigation looking into possible pay-for-play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation has been going on for more than a year. Led by the white collar crime division, public corruption branch of the criminal investigative division of the FBI.
The Clinton Foundation investigation is a, quote, “very high priority.” Agents have interviewed and reinterviewed multiple people about the Foundation case, and even before the WikiLeaks dumps, agents say they have collected a great deal of evidence. Pressed on that, one sources said, quote, “a lot of it,” and “there is an avalanche of new information coming every day.”
Some of it from WikiLeaks, some of it from new emails. The agents are actively and aggressively pursuing this case. They will be going back to interview the same people again, some for the third time.
As a result of the limited immunity deals to top aides, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the Justice Department had tentatively agreed that the FBI would destroy those laptops after a narrow review. We are told definitively that has not happened. Those devices are currently in the FBI field office here in Washington, D.C. and are being exploited.
The source points out that any immunity deal is null and void if any subject lied at any point in the investigation.
Meantime, the classified e-mail investigation is being run by the National Security division of the FBI. They are currently combing through former Democratic Congressman Anthony Wiener’s laptop and have found e-mails that they believe came from Hillary Clinton’s server that appear to be new, as in not duplicates.
Whether they contain classified material or not is not yet known. It will likely be known soon. All of this just as we move inside one week until election day.
Baier gives more details to Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume.
Transcript:
BRET BAIER: Here’s the deal: We talked to two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations. One: The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far… Several offices separately have been doing their own investigations.
Two: The immunity deal that Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two top aides to Hillary Clinton, got from the Justice Department in which it was beleived that the laptops they had, after a narrow review for classified materials, were going to be destroyed. We have been told that those have not been destroyed — they are at the FBI field office here on Washington and are being exploited. .
Three: The Clinton Foundation investigation is so expansive, they have interviewed and re-interviewed many people. They described the evidence they have as ‘a lot of it’ and said there is an ‘avalanche coming in every day.’ WikiLeaks and the new emails.
They are “actively and aggressively pursuing this case.” Remember the Foundation case is about accusations of pay-for-play… They are taking the new information and some of them are going back to interview people for the third time. As opposed to what has been written about the Clinton Foundation investigation, it is expansive.
The classified e-mail investigation is being run by the National Security division of the FBI. They are currently combing through Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They are having some success — finding what they believe to be new emaisls, not duplicates, that have been transported through Hillary Clinton’s server.
Finally, we learned there is a confidence from these sources that her server had been hacked. And that it was a 99% accuracy that it had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that things had been taken from that…
There has been some angst about Attorney General Loretta Lynch — what she has done or not done. She obviously did not impanel, or go to a grand jury at the beginning. They also have a problem, these sources do, with what President Obama said today and back in October of 2015…
I pressed again and again on this very issue… The investigations will continue, there is a lot of evidence. And barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they will continue to likely an indictment.
Hillary is facing massive consequences for her misdeeds, which voters would do well to consider before electing her president.
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By Catherine J Frompovich This is the continuation of the testimony I will present before the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission’s Administrative Law Court November 2 and 3, 2016. ... | 0 |
. Ever Heard of CAPTAGON? The Drug of the ISIS Terrorists Captagon? What’s that you may ask? Captagon is the addictive drug used by some of the numerous terro... http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/ever-heard-of-captagon-drug-of-isis.html Captagon? What’s that you may ask? Captagon is the addictive drug used by some of the numerous terrorists, jihadis, mercenaries and Western-backed rebels in Syria – including Al-Nusra and ISIS . Captagon (aka fenethylline, Biocapton or Fitton) was first produced in 1961 as a mix of amphetamine and theophylline. It became illegal in most countries in 1986 due to WHO pressure. Being a stimulant, it fuels feelings of euphoria, fearlessness and power, gives you an energy rush before the crash, and numbs emotions and empathy.These are of course all qualities which are ideal for soldiers who want to kill and not feel the pain. Apparently, captagon is playing a significant role in the Syrian War , both economically and in terms of its mood-altering ability. Multiple drug busts have occurred since 2010. Last year in November 2015, Turkish authorities confiscated 11 million Captagon pills (1800 kg and worth an estimated US$220 million) that were destined for Syria . Last month in October, Lebanese police seized 3.5 million Captagon pills that were headed for Saudi Arabia. Is the drug another avenue by which the Western alliance (NATO-US-UK) is trying to influence and control the outcome of the Syrian War ? Drugs and Soldiers: A Connection Old as Humanity Itself There is long history of tyrants, monarchs, despots, army generals and military leaders feeding drugs to their soldiers to enhance their performance. A very early example is Alexander the Great, whose army relied on the opium poppy plant for its morphine (and from which modern heroin is made). The morphine allowed his soldiers to walk and fight with grave injuries and achieve astonishing feats of endurance. In more recent history, in both world wars, American and German soldiers used amphetamines during battle. Historian Norman Ohler recently released a book “Der totale Rausch” (which literally translates as “Total Rush”) which exposes the Nazi use of drugs during WWII. This article quotes Norman:“… the (German) soldiers used Pervitin, a German product patented in 1937 that contains methamphetamine, which is known today as crystal meth. It was freely available as a medicine until 1939. “In Berlin, it became a drug of choice, like people drink coffee to boost their energy. People took loads of Pervitin, across the board. The company wanted Pervitin to rival Coca Cola. So people took it, it worked and they were euphoric …”The Nazi rise to power was fueled by their military industrial complex (funded by Americans and Wall St.), including IG Farben , their powerful pharmaceutical conglomerate which was the ancestor of Big Pharma today. Hitler himself was said to be addicted to opiates:“The first thing I wanted to see were the personal notes of Hitler’s personal physician Dr Theodor Morell –… these notes were quite elaborate, describing how he treated Hitler over the years, including things like “injection as always” and “Eukodal,” which is a strong opiate.” The opium poppy, source of morphine and heroin, used by Alexander the Great for his soldiers Captagon: The Force Behind Crazed ISIS Fighters Can captagon explain, at least to some degree, the crazed attitude of ISIS fighters? We don’t have definitive proof, but we do have a collation of many anecdotes and quotes indicating that the amphetamine-based drug is a factor. The Washington Post collected these ones:“You can’t sleep or even close your eyes, forget about it,” said a Lebanese user (featured in this BBC documentary ) “and whatever you take to stop it, nothing can stop it.”“I felt like I own the world high.”“Like I have power nobody has. A really nice feeling.”“There was no fear anymore after I took Captagon.”“So the brigade leader came and told us, ‘this pill gives you energy, try it,’” he said. “So we took it the first time. We felt physically fit. And if there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them. “You’re awake all the time. You don’t have any problems, you don’t even think about sleeping, you don’t think to leave the checkpoint. “It gives you great courage and power. If the leader told you to go break into a military barracks, I will break in with a brave heart and without any feeling of fear at all — you’re not even tired.”The world was first horrified by the cruelty of mercenaries like ISIS who were defiling historic sites and beheading prisoners. Was some of that barbarism due to drug-induced states? Where is the Captagon Being Made? The Cuban based website Prensa Latina released a short article in 2015 claiming that “according to experts, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began production of Captagon in 2011 in a laboratory in Bulgaria and it is now manufactured elsewhere in the world. “Part of the profits from the illegal trade in Captagon, experts say, is used to finance armed extremist groups that are trying to overthrow the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad.”The article, however, does not mention which “experts” it got its information from. While this fits in with what we know of NATO – a US-controlled, aggressive military organization which invades sovereign nations like Libya on the flimsiest of pretexts to gain territory and control for the New World Order – there still needs to be more research done to determine the source of captagon. Other sources suggest it is being produced in Sunni rebel areas. Captivated by Captagon The word captagon, coincidentally, is a mix of the words “captivate” and “Pentagon”– interesting given the addictive nature of the drug and the potential US role in providing it. War and drugs have a long history together, whether it be because the soldiers are been fed drugs by their commanders, or because the war itself is being fought over the land and fields that grow the drug-producing plants (Vietnamese and Afghani heroin, Latin American cocaine). In his article CIA Drug Wars Could Explain Why Syrian ‘Rebels’, ISIS Violence Fuelled by Captagon Pills , journalist Patrick Henningsen writes that:“the deliberate strategic dispensing of potent narcotics in a paramilitary, insurgency theater … is a common technique employed by US intelligence agencies … more often than not, these drugs are the X-factor which fuels the extreme violence we see, and it’s used to terrorize local populations and produces more extreme graphic imagery for western media consumption.“The result: it aids in the generation of western fear, and public calls for Washington & Co to “step-up” its military activity in the region – in order to “keep us safe” in cozy America. A vicious cycle. Isn’t this what we’ve seen in Syria so far?” By Makia Freeman Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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'Budget Amendment' for More Troops in Iraq, Afghanistan
The Pentagon has announced it will file a “budget amendment” seeking another $6 billion in funding for the current fiscal year to pay for additional overseas troop deployments above and beyond what was already in the budget for this year.
The $6 billion request comes as an “urgent” request from the Pentagon, and would pay for additional ground troops in Iraq, the additional troops left in Afghanistan by stalling the drawdown, and to pay for escalated airstrikes around the world.
Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord says the hope is to get the White House to approve submitting the request to Congress before next week’s election, with an eye at getting it added to the latest emergency spending bill, expected before early December.
These “emergency” funding bills are the main way to get around spending caps, with Congress deliberately funding the Pentagon only for a portion of the year with money that, by the cap’s reckoning, was the whole year’s budget, then slipping “emergency” bills in afterwards to pay for the rest of the year, while pretending the caps still exist. | 0 |
Topics: Politics , Hillary Clinton , Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , tobacco , Mike Pence Friday, 28 October 2016
Vice-Presidential hopeful Mike Pence, who hails from Indiana, almost got metaphorically "smoked" in public the other day, but escaped narrowly.
As this election season heats up, so does the scrutiny befalling the candidates involved. Tapes have been leaked of Donald Trump claiming he could do whatever he wants to women due to his superstar status, a slew of accusations have been hurled at Hillary Clinton (from e-mails, to bribery, and even intimations of murder). No one has yet to mention Tim Kayne, but I'm sure he'll catch up.
It was Indiana's Mike Pence who was up on the firing line last Wednesday when a group of journalists began questioning him about the clean-living Christian's stance on tobacco and its place in society.
Pence was asked how he, given his religious fervor, could align himself with the tobacco industries and lobby for them, knowing full well the illnesses and personal devastation they cause. His response as usual, was articulate and well measured as he gave the crowd a "quick reality check" about the real dangers of smoking. The man of faith, and apparently not science, stated that "despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill."
Pence then went on to explain that "2 out of every 3 smokers does not die" from a smoking-related illness and that he was "satisfied with the fact that a mere 33% of smokers died due to smoking. "We're big on basketball in Indiana, and any hoops fan," he elaborated, "would be happy with a point guard who could sink 2 out of 3 from three-point range."
The Hoosier then stated that "9 out of 10 smokers do not contract lung cancer," another statistic he took pride in. Grinning, Pence offered another sports analogy: "That's batting .900. Heck the best baseball players in the world can barely hit three hundred. They get paid 'bigly' if I may quote the next president of the country, Donald Trump, to fail 7 out of ten times. We succeed against cancer 9 out of 10 times. To quote Trump once again, I'm not 'unproud' of that."
Pence went on to say that he was also not "unproud" that his state has the 7th highest smoking rate in the country. "In fact, only a rugged and durable, pioneering and wholesome state, with such strong people in it could handle such a high proliferation of smoking and second-hand smoke. It says a great deal about the people of Indiana."
When asked about the fact that 17% of pregnant women in his state were active smokers (nearly double the national average), Pence responded: "Studies show that moderate to heavy tobacco intake during pregnancy has a few very positive effects. The first of which is that the size of the child, especially the head, is much smaller. This makes for an easier birth and causes less trauma to the mother. Children who have been exposed to tobacco in utero have much more energy and excitability - not to be confused with ADD or ADHD - and because they do not fixate on things they have an amazing ability to multi-task. In general, they are well-suited to the manual labor and work much longer hours in general due to being unencumbered by weighty intellects."
In response to statistics that demonstrate lower birth weights and higher rates of infant mortality, Pence responded by saying, "I'm a man of faith, a man from a wholesome, small-town background. I grew up with a cornfield in my backyard watching my mother and father build everything together. We had chickens and pigs out back. Every day as I grew up, I saw the harshness of nature: some pigs lived some pigs died. Some chickens lived and some chickens died. One night our dogs gave birth. There was a runt in the litter, badly deformed. My dad, a Korean War veteran knew that the only merciful thing to do was to take it out back and put it down. What kind of life would it have had? I feel as if that applies to us as humans as well. It's all in God's plan, who lives and who doesn't live. As for me, it's God first, politics second and The Republican party third."
Then, showing his political rhetoric skills, Pence then shifted gears to conclude. "After all, the relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second-hand smoke or back-handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric?" He ducked into his limousine and left it up to the people to decide. Make Chris Dahl's | 0 |
Islamic State supporters are celebrating the recent terrorist attack on London, England, distributing propaganda images via their social media channels calling for “no compromise. ”[The propaganda image depicts the silhouette of a man with a knife against the backdrop of a burning Tower Bridge (Tower Bridge, located close to London Bridge, is often confused with the latter — ISIS’s propagandists appear to have made the same mistake). Islamic Nashir News Telegram channels have just distributed a poster celebrating #London attack with a set of hashtags to tweet pic. twitter. — Michael S. Smith II (@MichaelSSmithII) June 4, 2017, The picture also shows a white van, similar to the one that was used by terrorists to run down civilians in London Saturday. The image was shared on channels on the Telegram messaging app. A recent post in the channel featured a clip from the Islamic State calling on Muslims to stage terrorist attacks during Ramadan, the “month of conquest and jihad. ” Nashir Telegram channels reposted compilation of messages posted at start of Ramadan, featuring clip of Adnani’ 2016 Ramadan address #London pic. twitter. — Michael S. Smith II (@MichaelSSmithII) June 4, 2017, social media accounts also distributed material calling for copycat attacks using trucks, knives, and handguns. 3) Earlier today, pro #ISIS channel urged to kill civilians: ”Run over them by vehicles” image of truck, gunknife https: . pic. twitter. — Rita Katz (@Rita_Katz) June 3, 2017, Other Islamic State supporters were seen celebrating, mainly on Telegram, the messaging app currently favoured by jihadis. “We’re coming for you from Iraq,” said one, while another boasted, “the wolves have awakened. ” 6) #ISIS channels continue to celebrate #LondonAttack as”the black days we’ve promised”,the wolves have awakened”responding to ISIS calls pic. twitter. — Rita Katz (@Rita_Katz) June 4, 2017, Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, has responded to the attack on London by calling for more internet regulation, criticizing internet providers for allowing “safe spaces” for Islamist radicals. This approach has been criticized by civil liberties campaigners, who call May’s proposal a “poor, very political response” that could “push these vile networks into even darker corners of the web, where they will be even harder to observe. ” You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to abokhari@breitbart. com. | 1 |
America belongs to immigrants because immigrants make the nation more powerful, says a former Wall Street Journal writer who is now working for the New York Times. [Immigrants produce more babies, work harder, create more jobs, and have more ideas, claims the revealing column by Bret Stephens: I speak of Americans whose families have been in this country for a few generations. Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning … Bottom line: real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be — when “we” had just come off the boat … Stephens’ article includes several statistical flubs, plus grotesque generalizations, and regurgitated agitprop. For example, Stephens says the United States “is a country of immigrants” even though roughly 84 percent of people living in the United States were born in the United States — despite the huge influx of immigrants over the last few decades. Similarly, Stephens treats immigrants as a uniform mass, as if he believes that migrating gang members are as beneficial as are inventors. But the article’s main feature is the progressive view that people — Americans, foreigners, whatever — should be selected by the State to serve the State’s progressive leadership class in D. C. and Wall Street. That view is shared by former President Barack Obama, who told supporters in November 2014 that: Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration. If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks’ — even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans. That view allows Stephens to ignore the Declaration of Independence which declared that people’s rights came from a higher source than government: “We hold these truths to be that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ” The elitist view also allows Stephens to welcome mass immigration because — not despite, but because — it hugely distorts the nation’s economy in favor of elite business leaders and major cities. Mass immigration spikes profits and stock values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by and employees, drives up real estate prices, reduces investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and sidelines marginalized Americans and their families. Mass immigration also imposes the social “diversity” which helps Stephens and his allies as they claim a Darwinian right to fragment, divide and rule Americans without any rude interference by the voters on November 8, 2016. In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 campaign on a promise to put Americans first. He told his inauguration listeners that he would hold to a policy of “Buy American, Hire American,” he has started enforcing immigration laws and is pushing for a “ ” immigration plan that would raise the productivity and wealth of Americans. Read the New York Times column here. Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart. com, | 1 |
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Al Franken ( ) claimed “a few” of his Republican colleagues have expressed concerns about President Donald Trump’s mental health. Franken said, “We all have this suspicion that, you know, he lies a lot. He says things that aren’t true. That’s the same as lying, I guess. You know, 3 to 5 million people voted illegally … That is not the norm for a president of the United States or actually for a human being. ” ( The Hill) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
SHANGHAI — Zheng Ruizhen counted herself among the last holdouts on Lufeng Road. Even as sprang up in recent years to surround her dilapidated home, Ms. Zheng, a schoolteacher, and her husband, Sun Guojian, held firm. He grew up there. Her school was a bicycle ride away. They raised their son there, though he eventually grew so tall that his head grazed the ceiling of his cramped room. When city officials pushed them to sell, they said no. Then came China’s latest property bubble — a frothy surge in prices that could have global repercussions if it pops. In August, an unremarkable piece of land around the corner from Ms. Zheng sold for nearly $2, 000 a square foot, a national record and nearly three times the average land price in Manhattan. Local officials grew more insistent and threatened to tear down their bathroom. Finally, they relented, and Ms. Zheng’s husband signed away the home for a price to be determined later. Then, on Oct. 9, Mr. Sun died of a heart attack, something Ms. Zheng said was perhaps influenced by stress over the pending demolition of their home. Now, as she grieves, she is waiting to hear how much the Shanghai government will offer in compensation — but however much that is, she knows it will not be enough for her to be able to afford to live anywhere close to Lufeng Road. Said Ms. Zheng: “I never expected housing prices in Shanghai would get this high. ” China is in the midst of a dizzying housing bubble. Shanghai’s average housing price is up nearly from a year ago, with prices in major cities like Beijing and Guangzhou not far behind. Chinese consumers are rushing to buy homes before the government steps in with restrictions. When rumors swept through Shanghai that the government would require homeowners to pay more in taxes and down payments to buy additional properties, many couples filed for divorce so that one partner could still be treated as an independent buyer. China has experienced housing booms and busts before. And fervor for real estate among the wealthiest Chinese has already spread far beyond the country’s borders, from Long Island mansions to disused ranches in Texas — many to get their money out of the country. But economists warn that the current boom on the Chinese mainland could be extra difficult to resolve: It comes with a growing amount of debt. household loans — mostly mortgages — have doubled as a share of total official bank lending this year. They accounted for about 40 percent of all new loans in August, contrasted with just 20 percent at the start of the year. The value of new home loans as a percentage of all housing sales has surged to a record high. The loans — largely a byproduct of a flood of Chinese lending to keep the economy growing — are helping the affluent, the middle class and low earners who have dreamed of owning a home, while investors and speculators are piling in, too. Underground lenders — those who operate outside the formal banking system using a variety of new platforms — are also helping to feed the boom. Last month, economists at the Bank of China warned in a report that worsening asset price bubbles were adding to a frothy market that could result in trouble. The day before, Wang Jianlin, a politically connected property and entertainment magnate who is one of the country’s richest people, told CNN that China property was “the biggest bubble in history. ” That could be bad news for the global economy. Many economists estimate that housing and related areas — like construction, cement manufacturing or furniture making — account for roughly of China’s economic activity. But if the bubble pops, that support could disappear quickly. Chinese officials, apparently mindful of the 2008 American housing bust, appear to be aware of the risks of a property bubble. But some economists worry they will be too slow to rein it in. “The risk is that the government is late in cooling the market, the rally spreads to more areas, pushing up household leverage and construction activity, pushing the bubble bigger, which is then followed by a bigger downward correction,” said Tao Wang, the head of China economics at UBS in Hong Kong. Local regulators are already trying to cool things down. In the last few weeks, local authorities have accelerated efforts to tighten housing markets in up to 20 Chinese cities, according to economists at China International Capital Corporation, an investment bank. But in many cases these steps have only added to the rush, as home buyers move in while they can. By her account, Zhang Xia and her husband have enjoyed a happy marriage. Then the rumor swept the city that Shanghai authorities would make it harder for couples with one home to buy more. On a recent Monday, Ms. Zhang, a resident of Shanghai’s Huangpu area, and her husband sat waiting at a local marriage registry office to file for divorce. Shanghai officials continue to deny that they will limit house buying by couples, but Ms. Zhang is among many who do not believe them. “We know the government said this is a rumor, but they also said that a few times before, when the rumor actually came true,” Ms. Zhang said. “Some people even said the fact that the government said it’s a rumor means it’s going to be true. ” Shanghai, China’s financial capital, is at the heart of the property boom. Demand there is so intense that developers now commonly require sizable deposits of cash just to join a lottery to buy a new apartment. Only holders of winning numbers will be offered the chance to buy a unit. One flashy new development in central Shanghai charges a refundable 200, 000 renminbi, or $30, 000, to enter its lottery. “In Shanghai now,” said Wang Jie, a sales manager there, “it’s not like you can buy an apartment just because you have money. ” Back on Lufeng Road, the recently widowed Ms. Zheng and her neighbors try to go about their lives despite the boom going on around them. Men and women play near a house, one of a number of dwellings along the road in various states of disassembly, like a row of rotting teeth. Stray dogs sunbathe and alley cats hunt around piles of red bricks and wooden beams scattered on the street. In recent months, local officials hung red propaganda banners on people’s housing extolling the benefits of selling out. “No more hesitation means no more disappointment,” reads one. Says another: “Requisition and compensation are lawful. Smart alecks will regret it later. ” “Look at those banners,” Ms. Zheng said, shaking her head. “It’s almost like the Cultural Revolution once again. ” Earlier, local officials told Ms. Zheng that the land where her home stands would be used to build supporting facilities for the complex of built by China Vanke, the country’s largest property developer. “They said that when people who live in the in Vanke look down, the view from their windows is our ugly roofs,” she said. “So they have to get rid of us. ” | 1 |
You Are Here: Home » Latest Posts » Anxiety and Worry Increase Risk of Heart Disease Anxiety and Worry Increase Risk of Heart Disease Prev post Next post
by Ana Sandoiu – MNT
Anxiety is a serious health concern affecting a large part of the American population. Now, new research indicates that health anxiety might increase the risk of heart disease.
Health anxiety might increase the risk of heart disease, research finds. In the United States, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness, affecting 40 million adults, or 18 percent of the population.
Anxiety is a known risk factor for heart disease . Previous research indicates a connection between depression and anxiety and the risk of coronary heart disease .
A meta-analysis found that anxious people have a 48 percent higher risk of dying from a heart problem.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death among Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), killing 365,000 people in 2014. New research suggests that the consequences of health anxiety are also serious and the condition should be treated properly.
Health anxiety describes a patient’s excessive worrying over having a serious illness, and seeking medical advice in the absence of a physical disease.
Patients with health anxiety misread physical symptoms as serious illnesses, and they often seek repeated medical help for the same issues. In its most intense form, health anxiety becomes hypochondria . Health anxiety and heart disease
Researchers led by Line Iden Berge, from the Helse Bergen hospital in Bergen, Norway, examined the link between health anxiety and heart disease. The results were published in the online journal BMJ Open .
Berge and team worked with participants in the Norwegian Hordaland Health Study (HUSK). This long-term study followed participants over a period of 12 years, and it was a collaboration between the National Health Screening Service, the University of Bergen, and local health services.
The 7,052 participants were born between 1953-1957. For the study, they had to answer questions about their health, lifestyle, and educational achievement.
Between 1997-1999, they underwent blood tests, weight, height, and blood pressure measurements. Participants were also asked to report their anxiety levels using the Whiteley Index. Scores above 90 percent were considered to be anxiety cases.
Over the entire study period, 234 participants, or 3.2 percent of the entire cohort, had an ischemic incident – either a heart attack or acute angina . Health anxiety raised heart disease risk by 73 percent
During follow-up, twice as many participants with health anxiety developed heart disease, compared with those who did not report any anxiety. Around 6.1 percent of health anxiety cases developed ischemic heart disease (IHD), compared with 3 percent of non-cases.
Because participants had been enrolled in a nationwide research project monitoring heart disease, their heart health was monitored extensively. The national program, entitled “Cardiovascular diseases in Norway,” was carried out between 1994-2009, so the study could track participants using national hospital data and death certificates up to 2009.
After adjustments for established cardiovascular risk factors, researchers found a 73 percent increased risk of developing IHD among cases with health anxiety.
Even considering established risk factors for IHD, such as smoking, high cholesterol , and education, health anxiety was a high risk factor for IHD. The risk of IHD also increased proportionally with the level of reported anxiety; the stronger the symptoms of health anxiety, the higher the risk of IHD.
Regarding gender, a very slight increase in IHD risk was noticed in women with health anxiety over their male counterparts. Trust your heart
Caveats to the results of the study include the fact that this is an observational study, telling us little about the cause-and-effect relation between anxiety and IHD.
Also, health anxiety is often associated with other mental health issues, such as general anxiety and depression, so the different types of anxiety and ways in which they increase the risk of heart disease can be difficult to differentiate. “[Our study] further indicates that characteristic behavior among persons with health anxiety, such as monitoring and frequent check-ups of symptoms, does not reduce the risk of [coronary heart disease] events,” the researchers write.
On the contrary, keeping the body in a constant state of alert might further increase the risk of heart-related incidents.
This puts both patients with anxiety and doctors in a difficult position. Telling an anxious patient that their anxiety is not a symptom of heart disease might help, but on the other hand, informing them that health anxiety might induce heart disease over time could cause them even more anxiety. 5 Herbs That Relieve Anxiety
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by Raw Michelle – Natural News Tao Porchon-Lynch can balance all of her weight on her forearms, lifting her entire body up and parallel to the floor without the need for support from her legs. She also engages in competitive dancing, cutting a rug with dancing partners half her age. The big deal? She’s 95! Clearly, Porchon-Lynch […] How to Avoid Fluoride in Water and Toothpaste
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by Ethan Huff – Naturalnews.com European scientists have come up with a new technology that is allegedly better able to detect the presence of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in food, animal feed and seeds. As published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, a new study out of Slovenia explains how the new technology, known as Droplet Digital […] Awesome Pallet House Built For $500
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by Antonia – Natural News For fruitarian and endurance athlete Michael Arnstein, his 15-mile commute to work isn’t by car, bus or train. Instead, he runs to the office, jogging through residential neighborhoods and eventually New York’s Central Park, pausing only to enjoy fruit along the way. Before his run, he may enjoy a breakfast of […] 3 Herbs to Boost Your Lungs
Use the herbs Elecampane, Coltsfoot, and Mullein to significantly boost your lung function and help ensure you are getting oxygen to every vital organ. by Michelle Schoffro Cook – Care2.com Our lungs work overtime for us every day, ensuring that we have sufficient oxygen to power every bodily function. With increasing levels of pollution in our […] Join For Free! Discover Little Known Health Secrets and Useful Tips For Healthy Living! First Name | 0 |
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Donald Trump told an invitation-only audience of 700 supporters in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday that if elected, he will offer a “new deal for black America.”
He rolled out the plan wrapped in three promises .
“I want to talk about how to grow the African American middle class and to provide a new deal for black America. That deal is grounded in three promises — safe communities, great education, and high paying jobs.”
Of those promises, he said, in part:
1. Safe Communities
"Making our communities safe again will be a priority. You walk to the store to buy a loaf of bread maybe with your child and you get shot. We got to stop it.
[T]he law will be applied fairly, equally and without prejudice. We will also police our streets—have to keep our streets safe.
The problem is not the presence of police but the absence of police. We need really a great group of people to keep you safe, to keep us all safe."
2. Education
"School choice is at the center of my plan. And by the way we’re going to terminate common core and bring education local.
My proposal redirects education spending to allow every disadvantaged child to attend the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice."
3. Jobs
"When we stop off-shoring to low wage countries, we raise wages at home meaning rent and bills become instantly more affordable.
I will also propose tax holidays for inner city investments, a new tax incentive to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods.
I will also pursue financial reforms to make it easier for young African Americans to get credit to pursue their dreams in business and create jobs in their communities."
Trump has repeatedly asked America's blacks “what do you have to lose?” On Wednesday, he once again explained why minorities should reject Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
“We keep electing the same people over and over and over and they keep coming back to the African American community and the Hispanic community and they keep talking about what they’re going to do and they don’t do it and four years later you see them again.”
Based on a CBS News poll released last week, Trump has a steep hill to climb with less than two weeks to go — he received support from just 4 percent of likely black voters. | 0 |
Trump on Dropping ’MOAB’ in Afghanistan: ’Don’t Know’ If It Sends Message to N. Korea https: . pic. twitter. In remarks given to the media on Thursday, President Donald Trump said he did not know whether or not if the use of the “mother of all bombs” on an ISIS stronghold in Afghanistan would send a message to North Korea. He added, however, North Korea would be “taken care of” and emphasized his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he does not know whether the U. S. military’s use of the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan will send a message to North Korea, but he said “the problem” with that country “will be taken care of,” regardless. “I don’t know if this sends a message,” he replied. “It doesn’t make a difference if it does or not. North Korea is a problem. It’s a problem that will be taken care of. I will say this — I think China has really been working very hard. I have really gotten to like and respect President Xi. He’s a terrific person. We spent a lot of time together in Florida. And he’s a very special man. So we’ll see how it goes. I think he’s going to try very hard. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
47 На 101 году жизни скончался старейший член японской императорской семьи принц Микаса — дядя правящего императора Японии Акихито.
После госпитализации с подозрением на острое воспаление легких в середине мая 2016 года, брата императора Хирохито не раз переводили в отделение интенсивной терапии в связи с различными осложнениями, сообщает телеканал NHK со ссылкой на источники.
В июне ему был вживлён кардиостимулятор, однако он так и не покинул госпиталь вплоть до своей смерти утром 27 октября.
Микаса, пятый в линии наследования японского престола, был последним живущим членом японской императорской семьи, принимавшим участие во Второй мировой войне. После войны посвятил себя изучению семитских языков. | 0 |
YORK, Pa. — Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, has never met Charles Kress, but he desperately needs him. Mr. Kress, 62, will vote for a Democrat this November for the White House, he said, no matter what. He is also planning to vote for Mr. Toomey’s . “Sometimes you have to keep in office the ones who make the deals,” Mr. Kress said as he watered the flowers in front of York’s Unitarian church. Republican senators like Mr. Toomey who are running in swing states — about six, and enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate — need voters who would reject Donald J. Trump to nonetheless pull the levers for the party’s other candidates in November. In some districts, House Republicans will need them, too. Mr. Trump’s convincing sweep of the primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island on Tuesday did little to assuage concerns about his standing with swing voters in November. His victory speech included a bracing broadside against Hillary Clinton’s playing the “woman card. ” And he continues to trail his opponents, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, among Republican women. But voters in federal races have become increasingly rare over the last two decades, hitting a low in 2012, when only 10 percent of them divided their votes between parties. That was down sharply from 1972. The ranks of voters have expanded along with the rise in partisanship and its attendant rancor in Congress. “There is no doubt that, over all, the era of polarization and above and beyond idiosyncratic factors — that has to lead to a drop in ticket splitting,” said Richard Born, a professor of political science at Vassar College and an expert on congressional elections. “Democrats and Republicans alike, as part of the polarization phenomenon, are more consistently liberal or conservative across issues,” Mr. Born said, “as are the candidates themselves, meaning less likelihood of ticket splitting. ” Even in Pennsylvania, a state that has elected a senator from a different party than the presidential candidate it chose seven times since World War II, ticket splitting has decreased drastically in recent elections. “That is probably Toomey’s worst problem,” said G. Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College. It is also a problem for the Republican senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mark S. Kirk of Illinois and Rob Portman of Ohio. Republicans in Washington are increasingly worried for them. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and other Republicans are openly urging elected officials in their party to focus largely on local issues and their role in bipartisan legislation, and to refrain from tying themselves to the top of the ticket should the nominee be Mr. Trump. “I think we have to go out and make a case,” said Representative Scott Perry, a Republican who represents the York area. “People don’t split their tickets because they don’t have a choice. It’s because they do. I think those people are going to need to be convinced. ” While a polarizing presidential candidate is considered very difficult for Republican senators to overcome in swing states, there may be a silver lining for them. Some Republican donors are quietly plotting to dismiss Mr. Trump and instead pour their money into Senate races where they believe Republicans can be saved, as a check and balance to a Democrat sitting in the White House for the next four years. “The prospect of Trump at the top of the ticket could create an exodus of donors away from the presidential and toward Senate and House races,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist. “The potential is there for a concentration of effort and resources geared toward Senate races that Chuck Schumer and his Senate Democrats may not have been counting on. ” Mr. Schumer, a New Yorker who is poised to become the next leader of the Senate Democrats, says good luck with that. “If there was ever a national election, this is it,” he said. “They can run from their nominee, but they can’t hide. ” Ticket splitting over the last five decades has occurred most often among moderate Democrats who have supported a Republican for president but voted for Democrats for Congress. Some voters have viewed this as a recipe for compromise and balance, while others have been repelled by the Democratic candidates running for the top job. The three strongest years of ticket splitting between presidential and House voting in the last five decades, according to American National Election Studies survey data, were 1972, when 30 percent of voters did it 1980 (28 percent) and 1984 (26 percent). Similar studies show the same trend for Senate races. In all three of those elections, a Republican won the White House by a landslide at a time when registered Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans in the overall population, and when considerably more incumbent House members were Democrats. The 1928 election provides a history lesson in what can happen when a candidate, rather than the political mood, drives ticket splitting. That year, Al Smith, the governor of New York, became the Democratic nominee. It was not extreme rhetoric like Mr. Trump engages in, which has repelled some Republicans, that held Mr. Smith back with voters. Mr. Smith was a Roman Catholic, opposed Prohibition and was a symbol of modern urbanism. And that combination drove off rural and moderate Southern Democrats, who outnumbered Republicans significantly, contributing to his loss to the Republican Herbert Hoover. While Republicans made a net gain of eight seats in the Senate that year, demonstrating that ticket splitting does not help all senators attached to the party of a wildly unpopular candidate, many Democrats still voted along party lines for the House and Senate. In 1996, when it was clear that Bill Clinton would trounce Bob Dole, Republicans encouraged voters to stick with their party in the down ballot, and Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, cautioned his members to distance themselves from Mr. Dole. Mr. Gingrich came up with a parallel House agenda much as Speaker Paul D. Ryan is now doing, and he told members to run on it. “It saved the House and the Senate for them,” said Mr. Born, the Vassar professor. “Trying to localize the campaigns paid off. ” But Republican ticket splitters may make an alternative choice that is equally damaging to Mr. Toomey’s prospects. “I might just skip the whole thing,” said Kristi Peyton, 46, a Toomey fan who offered her views of Mr. Trump — “disaster,” “bully” and “unattractive” — over crabs at Captain Bob’s in Railroad, a small town near York. “Where Republicans can really get hurt is not so much that people vote Democrat for Congress but that they don’t show up at all,” Mr. Born said. “This is where the Republicans are scared to death. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump said late Monday night that “no new deals will be done” by his real estate business while he is in the Oval Office, a promise that appeared meant to address ethical concerns about conflicts of interest between his elected position and his real estate empire. But the move is unlikely to satisfy critics, including the government’s official ethics office, who have said the only way for Mr. Trump to avoid such conflicts is to entirely divest his stake in the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump said on Twitter just after 11:30 p. m. that he would leave his businesses before his inauguration and that his grown sons, Eric and Donald Jr. along with other executives, would manage them. He added, “No new deals will be done during my term( s) in office,” and promised to hold a news conference soon to discuss the plans. Mr. Trump had originally said, in an earlier Twitter post, that he would announce his business plans during a news conference on Dec. 15. But officials with the transition confirmed on Monday that the news conference had been delayed. Now, he will not hold it until January — most likely before his inauguration and after a vacation at his resort in Florida, officials said, confirming a report in Bloomberg News. The officials said building a cabinet had consumed more of Mr. Trump’s time than expected. And they said he needed more time to decide how to deal with the large, iconic real estate holdings that are part of the global Trump business. Even if Mr. Trump and his children stop making new deals, the Trump Organization already has a large basket of investments and branding deals that present apparent conflicts of interest around the world. In Washington, Mr. Trump and his family recently opened the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue — in a building rented from a federal government agency that Mr. Trump will soon oversee. Mr. Trump is also of a hotel in Las Vegas, where a dispute with workers is pending before the National Labor Relations Board, which Mr. Trump will also oversee by appointing its members. The Trump Organization has business partners in the Philippines, Brazil, India, Turkey and other nations where Mr. Trump himself has acknowledged a conflict of interest over real estate projects. At the same time, he will need to deal with top officials in Turkey over matters like the fight against the Islamic State and the continued crackdown on dissidents there after an attempted coup. Mr. Trump, at least so far, has not given any hint that he intends to sell these assets or sever ties with business partners he says he will instead turn over management of the operations to his children. His family continues to personally profit from the investments, which ethics experts said could present a conflict of interest even if Mr. Trump and his family do not enter new deals. Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush, said Mr. Trump’s latest Twitter posts meant very little in terms of eliminating conflicts. “It makes no sense to say ‘no new deals,’” Mr. Painter said, questioning why the would make an announcement just before midnight on a Monday. “What is he talking about?” “Is he going to continue to borrow money from foreign banks like Bank of China? That is a deal,” Mr. Painter said. “Or collect rent from foreign companies? That is a deal. Will he still be hiring people, or having people stay in his hotels?” The news conference this week would have been Mr. Trump’s first since the election. He had announced last week it on Twitter, promising to “discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country. ” | 1 |
On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” House Freedom Caucus member Representative Jim Jordan ( ) touted legislation he will be introducing later in the day to just do a clean repeal of Obamacare, and criticized the replacement plan as “Obamacare in a different form. Because we didn’t tell the voters we were going to repeal Obamacare, but keep some of the Obamacare taxes. We didn’t tell the voters we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but keep and extend Medicaid expansion. And we certainly didn’t tell the voters we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but start a new entitlement. ” Jordan said, “[L]et’s do this right, and, more importantly, let’s do what we told the voters we’re going to do. That’s why today I’ll be introducing legislation which just says clean repeal. Let’s vote on the exact same thing, 15 months ago, every single Republican in the House, every single Republican in the Senate voted on. We put it on President Obama’s desk. Of course, he vetoed it. But let’s put that same legislation on President Trump’s desk, and then work on the replacement model that will actually bring down the cost of insurance. I don’t think the plan they introduced yesterday is going to bring down the cost for working class and middle class families. ” He stated of the current replacement, “Every conservative group out there is opposed to this legislation, because, as I said yesterday and others have said, I think it’s Obamacare in a different form. Because we didn’t tell the voters we were going to repeal Obamacare, but keep some of the Obamacare taxes. We didn’t tell the voters we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but keep and extend Medicaid expansion. And we certainly didn’t tell the voters we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but start a new entitlement. ” He further said that he doesn’t think the current replacement “could pass today. … So, this needs to be changed in a dramatic way for it to have a chance to pass, in my judgment. ” Jordan continued his criticism of the current replacement, arguing, “[T]his is what Americans hate. We campaign on one thing, and then we get here and say, oh, we can’t do what we campaigned on. We really can’t do a clean repeal, and then replace it with something that’s going to bring down the costs. We’ve got to mush it all together and do some different form of Obamacare. That’s what the American voters hate. Let’s do what we told them we were going to do. Let’s do what they sent us here to do and what they expect us to do. ” Jordan also stated, “Even if you don’t have the CBO score, look at the four corners of the document and read what it says. I think it’s not going to bring down the cost of premiums for working class and middle class families. That’s why I oppose it. I think it’s Obamacare, as I’ve said, Obamacare in a different form. That’s why I oppose it. But it would also be nice to have a score. I can’t believe the score won’t be high because, when you’re extending and expanding the Medicaid expansion, when you’re starting this new entitlement called advanceable refundable tax credits, when you’re doing all that, I’ve got to believe that’s a cost to the federal government. But apart from that, just look at what it does, it keeps the federal government in control of how this thing works, the exchange and that sort of thing. That’s the wrong approach because we’ve seen how bad Obamacare has been for the American people the last six years. ” Jordan added his replacement plan “would put in place policies that will bring back affordable insurance. That’s the big problem right now. If people can afford the premiums, they can’t afford the deductibles. Fewer choices, higher costs is what Obamacare has given us. We want those policies, like expanded health savings accounts, interstate shopping, easier formation of association health plans, tax deductibility on the individual market side so that you begin to equalize treatment for folks who get their insurance in the individual market with those who get plan insurance. So, that’s what we want to do. Those kinds of things will bring down the cost. And most importantly, you get out all the regulations which drove up the cost of insurance. Never forget what Obamacare did. It set mandates, taxes, and regulations, drove up the cost of insurance, told every American, you have to buy it, and if you don’t, there’s a penalty. That’s what we have to get away from. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
By Ulson Gunnar Militants led by designated terrorist organisation, Jabhat Al Nusra, now obliquely referred to by the Western media as “Jabhat Fateh al-Sham,” has... | 0 |
The British government has raised the country’s terror threat level to “critical” indicating the military may be deployed onto UK streets. [The move — following an emergency meeting of Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) — takes the UK to its highest terror threat level for the first time in a decade. In June 2007, the level was raised from ‘Severe’ indicating a “an attack is highly likely” to ‘Critical’ indicating “an attack is expected imminently” following the discovery of multiple car bombs at locations outside nightclubs and airports. The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) which in turn reports to security services such as MI5, is responsible for the elevated threat level following the Monday night terrorist attack in Manchester that killed 22 and injured over 100 people. The threat level had previously been downgraded to ‘Substantial’ meaning an attack is a “strong possibility” between July 2011 and August 2014. It was then raised to Severe in response to events in Iraq and Syria, coinciding with a high point of territorial gain by the Islamic State. The United Kingdom has five terror levels: Low, Moderate, Substantial, Severe, and Critical. Since the implementation of the new levels in 2006, the rating has never dropped below Substantial. Reports emerging from the UK press also suggest around 5, 000 members of the UK’s military may be deployed onto British streets in order to deter attacks. Unlike its European counterparts, Britain has little tradition of deploying the military on domestic soil. The last serious deployment was in 2003, when tanks were stationed at Heathrow Airport in an attempt to disrupt a passenger airliner bomb plot. Around 450 troops were also deployed at this time. Prior to that, the last time a major British Army contingent was deployed in Britain was during the Troubles, when Irish Republican terrorists routinely targeted British population centres, one of which included the central Manchester area just five minutes from the arena where Ariana Grande’s concert ended in terror on Monday night. During the Troubles, the British army deployed 21, 000 troops. | 1 |
Videos Podesta Emails Part 24: Wikileaks Releases Another 2,620 Emails; Total Is Now 39,511 Among today's emails, among the thousands of emails, in May 2015 email from Jen Palmieri to Joel Benenson of the Benenson strategy group suggests that Hillary Clinton knows everything about the Clinton Foundation donors. Be Sociable, Share!
In the aftermath of one of the most memorable October shocks in presidential campaign history, and down the final stretch in the presidential race which has just over one week left, Wikileaks continues its ongoing broadside attack against the Clinton campaign with the relentless Podesta dump, by unveiling another 2,620 emails in the latest, Part 24 of its Podesta release, bringing the total emails released so far to exactly 39,511.
The release comes hours after Wikileaks warned that it was launching its “Phase 3” of election coverage this week..
In the latest, Sunday set, of emails Doug Band commented on Teneo’s relationship with the Clinton Foundation, saying “if this story gets out, we are screwed,” we learned that Google’s Eric Schmidt wanted to be “head outside advisor” to the Clinton campaign, and a potential conflict of interest with the Clinton Foundation assisting El Salvador in obtaining $50 million in cash. As usual we are parsing through the latest release and will bring readers the more notable emails. Among today’s emails, we find a May 2015 email from Jen Palmieri to Joel Benenson of the Benenson strategy group suggests that Hillary Clinton knows everything about the Clinton Foundation donors. We also find more direct involvement by Google’s Eric Schmidt, when in an April 2015 email to Cheryl Mills he tells her “I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I have scheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better.” A January 2012 email from Laura Graham to Cheryl Mills sheds some more light on the Teneo scandal: “Below see my draft. I really took a shot in the dark here and didn’t know how far we should go on these issues. I remain concerned that email will be forwarded to press and so am against sending an email altogether. If we want to include the broader list of individuals going to the PO (I left a marker in the text for that) then we obviously have to meet with people before any email or staff meeting.” A May 2013 email from Neera Tanden address to John Podesta discussing a WaPo article how a Super PAC plans to coordinated directly with the Clinton campaign leads to the following exchange: That’s fine But skirting if not violating law doesn’t help her INMHO This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge.com . Be Sociable, Share! | 0 |
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The Democratic fury at FBI Director James Comey’s frustratingly decision to throw a wrench into election with his obviously partisan decision to reignite the “email” non-scandal keeps growing by the day.
It’s becoming clear that Republican Congressmen, horrified at the way their candidate slides lower and lower in the polls, put undue pressure on Comey to give them an official, public, and entirely unnecessary “update” on the new emails that are – let’s reiterate – not to or from Hillary Clinton, are not related to her private email server, and were found on a cellphone belonging to Anthony Wiener, as part of a separate investigation into his illicit sexually-charged chats with a minor.
In light of that, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump has filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) with the Office of Congressional Ethics:
“Representative Chaffetz, in an ill-planned partisan attempt, released information that compromised the integrity of the FBI, when he irresponsibly tweeted out that the case investigating Secretary Clinton’s emails had been reopened, when in fact it had not been.
Members of Congress are elected to make our country a safer, better place- not to use their power to work with leaders such as Comey in a partisan fashion. I hope that both are held accountable for their actions.”
The complaint refers to this extremely misleading tweet, which fundamentally misrepresents what actually occurred. FBI Dir just informed me, “The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” Case reopened
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016
Jason Chaffetz and the rest of the self-appointed inquisitors on the House Oversight Committee have wasted millions of dollars in taxpayer funds and Congressional time prosecuting fruitless investigations against the character of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It’s high time we held them all accountable for abusing their power for undemocratic hit-jobs against their political opponents. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — A Army officer on Wednesday sued President Obama over the legality of the war against the Islamic State, setting up a test of Mr. Obama’s disputed claim that he needs no new legal authority from Congress to order the military to wage that deepening mission. The plaintiff, Capt. Nathan Michael Smith, an intelligence officer stationed in Kuwait, voiced strong support for fighting the Islamic State but, citing his “conscience” and his vow to uphold the Constitution, he said he believed that the mission lacked proper authorization from Congress. “To honor my oath, I am asking the court to tell the president that he must get proper authority from Congress, under the War Powers Resolution, to wage the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria,” he wrote. The legal challenge comes after the death of the third American service member fighting the Islamic State and as Mr. Obama has decided to significantly expand the number of Special Operations ground troops he has deployed to Syria aid rebels there. Mr. Obama has argued that he already has the authority he needs to wage the conflict against the Islamic State under the authorization to fight the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, enacted by Congress shortly after the attacks. That argument is controversial because the Islamic State is at odds with the leadership of Al Qaeda and its affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front. Critics contend that the administration is stretching the Sept. 11 authorization too far by applying it to an organization that did not exist in 2001 and that operates far from Afghanistan. The administration has countered that its position is legitimate because the Islamic State used to be a Qaeda affiliate in Iraq during the Iraq war. In an April 2015 speech, Stephen Preston, then the top Pentagon lawyer, argued that the fact that Al Qaeda splintered after the death of Osama bin Laden did not mean that the authority to keep fighting each successor faction came to an end. Administration officials have also said the fight against the Islamic State is covered separately by the 2002 authorization President George W. Bush obtained from Congress for the invasion of Iraq, although they are not relying on it. The administration has asked Congress to enact new authorization for using military force against the Islamic State, but lawmakers have not acted on that request. They have, however, passed military appropriations bills that earmark funds for the effort against the Islamic State, which could suggest that lawmakers have acquiesced to the executive branch’s theory. Captain Smith’s lawyers are David Remes, who has represented many Guantánamo detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, and Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law School professor who published a column in The Atlantic last year arguing that the war against ISIS was illegal and that a serviceman ordered to fight in it would have standing to challenge it in court. “We want to get this back on the agenda,” said Mr. Ackerman, calling the precedent Mr. Obama is setting a “turning point” for whether constitutional checks and balances on a president’s ability to initiate a new war at his own discretion will survive. Current and former administration officials have said that in 2014, when confronted by the Islamic State’s rapid conquest of Iraqi territory, Mr. Obama’s advisers presented him with a choice: he could say that bombing ISIS was part of the existing war, or he could say it was a new war. Each theory, they told him, was defensible, but each had its own downsides. Mr. Obama decided to go with the first one — that the Islamic State campaign was part of the existing . 11 war — because he believed that immediate intervention was necessary to halt a disaster but that the House of Representatives was too dysfunctional to vote on any war authorization within 60 days. That was important because the War Power Resolution, a law, says presidents must withdraw deployments into “hostilities” after 60 days if Congress has not authorized the operation to continue. In 2011, Mr. Obama’s air war intervention in Libya, which lasted longer than 60 days without congressional authorization, prompted criticism inside and outside the administration. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who has criticized the administration’s use of the 2001 war authorization to cover the Islamic State but is not involved in the suit, said the case was significant because it could overcome a major hurdle to getting a court to review that theory. But Mr. Goldsmith said Captain Smith faced many other hurdles, including precedents that suggest that when Congress appropriates money for a conflict it has implicitly authorized it. He also predicted that if a court did rule that the conflict was illegal, Congress would authorize the fight to continue — perhaps giving it broader scope than Mr. Obama has wanted. “We’re in a terrible equilibrium where Congress doesn’t want to step up and play its part in this military campaign and so the president has basically gone forward and done what he thinks he needs to do,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “It would be a lot better for everyone, including the president, if Congress got more involved. ” | 1 |
On Monday’s “CBS This Morning,” former Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook stated that Russia “could have been the reason,” Clinton lost the 2016 election. Mook was asked whether he believed Russian hacking caused Clinton’s loss. He answered, “I think it could have. This is the key, no campaign manager, no campaign manager, no candidate should ever sit at a table likes this on a news program and say, ‘I don’t know. The Russians might have been the reason we lost the election.’ It’s not important whether they were or not. What’s important is that it could have been the reason, and that should never happen again. ” ( Mediaite) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
The New York Observer, the chronicler of New York City’s power elite owned by Donald J. Trump’s Jared Kushner, is ceasing its print edition, just shy of its 30th year as a weekly paper. The issue printed this last Wednesday was the paper’s last, Joseph Meyer, chairman and chief executive of Observer Media, the paper’s parent company, said in an interview on Friday. The decision will eliminate the use of New York in the paper’s title — its website is Observer. com — and signals an end of an era when The Observer served as a fixture of Manhattan reporting and a training ground for scores of journalists now in senior positions in the media world. It also comes as newspaper coverage of New York City is being trimmed. The Wall Street Journal will publish its final Greater New York section on Saturday, a result of widespread cuts at the paper. The Daily News, whose staff has already shrunk, announced a new round of layoffs this week. The New York Times is rethinking its own Metro coverage as the paper seeks to lure global audiences. Mr. Meyer, in the interview, said the decision to close The Observer’s print edition was a natural outgrowth of the paper’s shift toward a national audience and the decline in print advertising that has afflicted the industry. Mr. Meyer, who is Mr. Kushner’s said the decision had been two years in the making and was not related to Mr. Trump’s election this week. Mr. Kushner, who is aiding Mr. Trump’s presidential transition, was not available to comment. Now focused on real estate coverage and provocative opinion, The Observer’s heyday came during the tenure of its former editor, Peter W. Kaplan, whose tutelage in reporting and arch prose became a rite of passage for a generation of prominent newspaper and magazine journalists. Mr. Kaplan died in 2013. The publication was founded in 1987 by the banker Arthur L. Carter. Its early editors included Graydon Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, and Susan Morrison, now the articles editor of The New Yorker. Under Mr. Kaplan, the newspaper originated the “Sex and the City” column by Candace Bushnell that later became a hit television series. Mr. Meyer said the Observer’s coverage of New York City politics and culture would continue, adding that the paper had open positions for new reporters and editors. Mr. Meyer said that no journalists would be laid off as part of the change to all digital. But several freelance writers at the newspaper were dismissed on Friday, along with one of the paper’s editors. Staff members said that several positions, vacated by layoffs or resignations, had remained unfilled. Observer. com received 5. 6 million unique visitors in September, nearly twice its audience from the year before, according to statistics from comScore. Mr. Meyer declined to disclose print circulation figures. Mr. Kushner’s purchase of The Observer in 2006, when he was 25, created tension between him and the paper’s journalists, some of whom later accused Mr. Kushner of interfering in coverage. But Ken Kurson, the Observer’s current editor, wrote on his Facebook page on Friday that he welcomed the move to digital, citing a rise in online readership and advertising. “This has been a week of incredible tumult, for our country, and now for this small business,” Mr. Kurson, who is close to Mr. Kushner, wrote in a post. “Who knows what the future holds, for me or for the USA or for Observer. ” “But I can tell you this much for sure,” Mr. Kurson added. “Observer’s future is brighter than it’s ever been. ” | 1 |
The phrase “ghost train” conjures up eerie, fantastical images: a spectral locomotive barreling through the night, passengers doomed to ride the rails forever. In Britain, ghost trains are real — but they’re more of a bureaucratic curiosity than a Halloween nightmare. They are scheduled passenger trains that hardly anyone actually rides, running infrequently at obscure hours and stopping at stations that almost no one uses. They might operate only once a week or in only one direction. Other than a lonely crew member or two, they are often completely empty. Why do they even operate? Believe it or not, to save money. Railway companies would rather not serve these routes at all, because they generate too little traffic. But if the companies discontinued the routes completely, they would be obliged under British law to formally abandon the lines, and that’s a very costly, and legally complex business. The only way to avoid that trouble and expense is to maintain some passenger service on the line, even if only on the barest of schedules. So the railways run the ghost trains, officially called parliamentary trains, just to satisfy the law — and don’t care whether anyone rides them. And it shows. At the stations where they originate, the railway may not bother to list parliamentary trains on the departure board or announce which platform they will use until the last minute, resulting in a mad dash by the rare intrepid traveler hoping to board. One of the more accessible ghost train experiences leaves at 11:36 a. m. on weekdays from Paddington Station in London, bound for West Ruislip over the line. Its platform is hidden in a far corner of the station, behind a temporary construction wall. On a recent run, there were just six passengers. One was Steve Hamshere, who had come to London from Berkshire, about 50 miles away, specifically to ride that train. “This line was built by the Great Western Railway and was the main line to Birmingham up until the 1960s,” Mr. Hamshere said. These days the Birmingham trains go a different way, and is kept open mainly as a quiet place where new drivers can practice away from other traffic. Obscurity and the relative difficulty of catching the parliamentary trains makes them strongly alluring for railway enthusiasts, who make a hobby out of riding as many as they can. Two ghost train fans, Liz Moralee and Tim even run a website for fellow devotees. “It is great to have a whole train to yourself,” Ms. Moralee wrote in an email. One of her strangest trips, she said, was to the Teesside Airport railway station, one of the in Britain. The parliamentary train there makes one round trip a week, on Sundays, and only 16 passengers used the station in all of 2015. The walk from there to the airport terminal it was built to serve may be why. “It is far from convenient for anyone using the airport, unless they fancy a trek,” Ms. Moralee said. | 1 |
By wmw_admin on March 10, 2013
This was shortly before they joined Islamic State “Holocaust” declared 7 years before there was a “Holocaust” By wmw_admin on December 13, 2014
The New York Times was already reporting of Jewish persecution and an ongoing “Holocaust” in May 31, 1936 Have You Read the Talmud Lately? By wmw_admin on September 3, 2006
The Talmud expounds some of the most virulent racism, as these extracts plainly show. However, as a reader points out not all Jews are influenced by it, or even read it. Only the ultra religious study it, the rest haven’t a clue. We leave you to decide The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010
Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance The Liberation of the Camps By wmw_admin on January 27, 2016
It is tantamount to virtual heresy to question the ‘Holocaust’ today. But did the extermination of 6 million really happen as we’ve been taught? US ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, blame it on Assad govt': Report By wmw_admin on June 15, 2013
This report appeared in January, 2013, but was subsequently removed from the Mail’s website. Fortunately some observers copied extracts, which we repost here The 9/11 Solution: The Big Clue Everyone Missed By wmw_admin on July 21, 2008
Google removed this video but a reader sent in a copy. Watch how the media carefully manipulates coverage of the events of 9/11, as they interview ‘experts’ who provide the cover story that has gone to make up the standard govt/media version of 9/11 | 0 |
German Parents Taken to Court for Refusing to Send Their Son to a Mosque
Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 28, 2016
You all thought I was cr y when I started pushing the idea that the women and even some of the liberal cucked men of Europe are actually pushing for forced Islamization of Europe on purpose.
You were all like “no no no, liberals are just stupid, they think they’ll integrate, or that there can be coexistence somehow – they just don’t get it.”
Well, where are we now?
RT :
Parents of a German teenager may face a trial and fine for âtruancyâ after refusing to allow their son to go to a local mosque on a school field trip out of fear that it would lead to his âindoctrinationâ by Islamic radicals.
The story broke in mid-June, when parents of a 13-year-old student opposed the idea of their son visiting a mosque in the northern German town of Rendsburg, reportedly organized as part of a geography class.
In a letter to the class teacher quoted  by the NDR, the teenâs father argued that his son would be âindoctrinatedâ in the mosque. He went on to say that âfor years we have been hearing reports about religiously-motivated violence connected with Islamic people.â
A local education authority subsequently fined the couple a total of âŹ300 ($328), referring to school regulations and regional laws which include penalties for truancy.
When the parents opposed the fine, their case was forwarded to Peter Mueller-Rakow, a local prosecutor, who will decide whether or not to proceed with a court trial, Spiegel reported on Wednesday.
The parentsâ lawyer, Alexander Heumann, argues that they refused the school trip out of fear for their sonâs âbodily safety.â
Denying any faith-based motives, he emphasized that the couple do not belong to any religious group, and are of the opinion that ânobody shall be forced into a sacred place against his good will.â
Heumann himself, however, is a former member of the Alternative for Germany party, an anti-immigrant political group, and was a participant in setting up the âDugida,â a Dusseldorf-based branch of the far-right PEGIDA movement.
Feminism is the complaint of a woman who doesn’t have a man to tell her what to do.
The entire goal of feminism is to force an end to feminism. That is why feminists are pushing for Islamization. They want to be told what to do. The immediate goal of their demonstrations is to get manhandled. It is a weird psycho-sexual thing that men couldn’t ever understand and women are unconscious of so incapable of explaining. But I assure you it is there.
They don’t care about race, because women are incapable of processing philosophical or ideological concepts. The only fact they are able to process – and this is on an emotional, subconscious level – is that their men refused to be men, and have told them to go be men, and that this is causing them extreme distress and blocking their ability to produce children.
This is what feminism is – women don’t say what they actually want, they express themselves in a way where you’re supposed to interpret their emotional state. When Femen riots naked, what they want is to be physically dominated by men – i.e. raped.
So they are replacing us with Moslems to fix their current state, which is feminism.
I told you people this. | 0 |
Other Writers “Racist, misogynist bully.”
“For Jews, these are worrying times . . . History shows that when bullies take charge, they turn on the Jews.” — The JC Leader, Trump Triumphant. So what now?
It is not an accusation, merely a statement of fact, to describe Donald Trump as a racist, misogynist bully. That such a man can be elected as President of the United States is deeply chilling.
For Jews, there is one specific aspect of his ascendency that is so worrying. His campaign was self-consciously antisemitic.
One of his main themes was that a global elite was conspiring against ordinary Americans. This is not only a classic antisemitic meme; the examples cited by Mr Trump were all – every one of them – Jewish, such as George Soros and the President of the Federal Reserve. Anyone who denies this element to Mr Trump’s campaign is living in a self-deluded fantasy.
Fantasy may be an apposite word. Perhaps the past few decades, when the US preserved a global order that destroyed prejudice rather than cementing it, was merely a short-lived fantasy.
With our history, that is a desperate prospect.
Many of us have always looked to the US as a beacon of freedom. When the Third Reich looked unstoppable and Britain stood alone, it was the US that then sacrificed so many of its sons to defeat the Nazis.
In the Cold War it was the US, through Nato, that ensured the Soviet Union was held in check.
And in recent years Nato has helped preserve the long-delayed freedom of Eastern Europe from the Warsaw Pact.
All that is now threatened.
Mr Trump cites Vladimir Putin as a role model and believes Nato no longer has a purpose.
The message is clear: far from standing up to an aggressive tyrant, he will willingly acquiesce in that aggression.
For Jews, these are worrying times.
We have already been scapegoated by Mr Trump, so it is no supposition to suggest that worse may be to come.
History shows that when bullies take charge, they turn on the Jews. One thought on “ Oi veh! — New Hitler gets elected ” Sardonicus says: November 12, 2016 at 4:44 pm
Yes, very sad. I am still drying my tears. That Americans should elect such a monster makes me want to renounce my citizenship and emigrate to Israel.
Only trouble is, they don’t want me. My race as a non-Jewish White person is unacceptable to them. I was actually told by a nice Jew at Ben-Gurion airport: “We don’t like White people and are doing our best to genocide them. That’s why we’re flooding your White homelands with millions of Third Word migrants.”
Yes, it’s a sad situation. | 0 |
Financial Markets , Gold , Market Manipulation , Precious Metals , U.S. Economy Comex gold manipulation , GLD , mining stocks , silver eagles admin
Out with the old, in with the old. Wall Street and the Fed wants to make nice with Trump so as soon as he accepted the next Presidency, the market manipulators went to work on pushing stocks higher and gold lower.
What happened with the threat issued by the media that if Trump were elected the stock market would crash? Yesterday Stanley Drunkenmiller issued a proclamation that he sold gold because inflation was coming. I do not believe that I have EVER come across any reference to the notion that gold in inversely correlated with inflation. Someone must’ve slipped Drunkenmiller some LSD in his scotch. But, then again, Drunkenmiller is part of the Soros family, which means he’s the enemy of the people and the truth.
The economic thesis connected to Trump is infrastructure spending and inflation generation. The insanely overvalued, over leveraged “infrastructure” stocks like Caterpiller and Terex screamed higher the last few days. But if Trump has his way with his economic ideas, corporate taxes will be cut and the Government will re-do the work Obama did on the infrastructure. Bridges to nowhere funded by more Government debt.
I’m sure most market participants with at least two brain cells to rub together – which de facto would exclude Larry Kudlow from this human demographic – have figured out that Trump’s game-plan would widen out the Federal spending deficit and further accelerate the issuance of more Treasury debt. It is likely that the Fed will have to monetize some of this new debt issuance. This is the perfect recipe for higher gold and silver prices.
What is occurring right now in the markets is nothing more than a knee-jerk response by the hedge fund algos to the overt intervention by the PPT (the Fed + the Working Group on Financial Markets). The PPT steps in to get stock and precious metals futures moving in opposite directions and the hedge fund black box computers pile in.
The massive take-down in gold is designed to make everyone feel better about Trump as the new president. But the price-smashing can only occur in the fraudulent paper gold markets in NY and London. Drunkenmiller is a fan, not surprisingly, of GLD – the quintessential postcard for fraudulent paper gold derivatives.
Today gold traded flat to up in the physical gold clearing eastern hemisphere markets. It wasn’t until the Comex opened that the real party for the criminal manipulators began. At one point, from 11:30 to noon EST 48,239 paper gold contracts were dumped on the Comex:
48,239 contracts represents 4.8 million ozs of paper gold – over 150 tons. Close to $6 billion worth of paper gold in 30 minutes. From 11:30 to the 1:30 Comex close EST, a little over 103,000 contracts were sold, representing 10.3 million ounces of paper gold, or 321.8 tons. The U.S. produces about 200 tons annually. Make no mistake, it is no coincidence that this hit on the price gold was gold timed to occur on a Friday holiday after the rest of the world had shut down their trading systems and went home for the weekend. This is standard modus operandi for the criminals running our system.
The Comex vaults are reporting a little over 2 million ounces available for delivery. If an imbalance between the futures and the underlying available physical commodity were this wide in any other CME market, the Government regulators would be cracking down on it immediately, no questions asked. Why is gold different? The gold and silver markets are the most manipulated markets in the world and the same people doing the manipulation will kept in place under Trump.
The good news is that the physical accumulation going on in the eastern hemisphere will accelerate next week with the lower price of gold. This always occurs. This will be the catalyst that will put a floor under the ability of the western elitists to push gold much lower.
I personally bought some physical gold this morning via Bitgold and reloaded some call options on some high quality large cap mining stocks and added to positions in my existing junior mining stock portfolio. The subscribers to my Mining Stock Journal were given my gameplan last night, including some names of other high quality mining stocks that have been beaten up and are overdue for big bounce. Share this: | 0 |
Donald J. Trump was officially declared the winner of the presidential election in Michigan on Monday amid calls for a recount there and in two other states. Mr. Trump, a Republican, defeated Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, by 10, 704 votes in the state, or less than a quarter of a percentage point, the Michigan Board of State Canvassers announced, nearly three weeks after the Nov. 8 election. The results, should they hold, bring his Electoral College vote total to 306, well beyond the 270 needed to win. Mrs. Clinton has 232. Michigan contributed 16 electoral votes to Mr. Trump’s total. News of his victory in Michigan came as Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, said she planned to call for a recount there after pursuing recounts in two other states. Wisconsin officials approved a timeline for a recount on Monday, and Ms. Stein is also suing for a recount in Pennsylvania, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Trump won all three states by a combined total of about 100, 000 votes. | 1 |
NEWARK — Almost as soon as Chris Christie was sworn in as governor of New Jersey in 2010, his administration began an elaborate courtship of Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee. There were private tours of ground zero for the mayor and his cousins, free tickets to the governor’s box at Giants football games, a ceremonial flag from the World Trade Center site, and money for firefighting equipment and shuttle buses in Fort Lee. The governor went to Fort Lee to tape a national television talk show at the town’s high school invited the mayor to his Christmas cocktail party and had him over for an intimate lunch in the private dining room at the governor’s mansion, which Mr. Sokolich called “a item for a mayor. ” The wooing continued into 2013, when Mr. Christie was up for and hoping that a broad victory would propel him to the front of the pack of contenders for the 2016 Republican nomination for president. He was gathering endorsements from Democratic mayors like Mr. Sokolich. The mayor said he could not go that far. It would take a few months, and what federal prosecutors in a courtroom here called an extraordinary act of political retribution, before Mr. Sokolich would begin to suspect that, as he recalled on Tuesday, “someone must be mad at me. ” “There was absolutely no plausible explanation” for what happened, the mayor said. As the first day of school dawned in September 2013, two access lanes to the George Washington Bridge were closed, locking Fort Lee in what Mr. Sokolich would call “concrete gridlock. ” And his onetime friends in the Christie administration would not return his calls, texts or emails. Mr. Sokolich took the stand in United States District Court here on Tuesday to tell the story at the center of the prosecution’s case: that Christie administration officials deliberately closed two of three access lanes to create a traffic jam in Fort Lee, all to punish the mayor for refusing to endorse Mr. Christie. It was the first day of testimony in the trial of the two Christie administration officials: Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, who ran the office responsible for collecting endorsements and Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which prosecutors say became an arm of Mr. Christie’s campaign. Mr. Sokolich’s recollection of gifts and favors underscored just how assiduously Christie administration officials used the levers of power to secure endorsements. And while the broad outlines of the lane closings — a scandal that ultimately sank Mr. Christie’s presidential ambitions — are well known, testimony from the mayor and his police chief offered dramatic details about the chaos in Fort Lee, and the futile efforts of the officials to get relief. “I was begging for someone to help,” Mr. Sokolich said. On the first morning of the lane closings, the police chief, Keith M. Bendul, had just pulled into a Department of Public Works facility to refuel his Ford Expedition when he received an anxious radio transmission from a traffic officer. He was standing near the access lanes to the bridge, and traffic was at a standstill. “I immediately knew it was not going to be good,” the chief recalled on Tuesday. The Port Authority, the bistate agency that operates the bridge, typically informs the Fort Lee Police Department well in advance of any traffic pattern changes, but this time, Mr. Bendul said, there had been no notice. Confused, he began calling his contacts there. “I reached out to everybody I could think of,” he said. Eventually, Mr. Bendul connected with Robert Durando, the general manager of the George Washington Bridge for the agency. Mr. Durando asked the police chief to talk with him, but not in his Port Authority office. Instead, he wanted to meet in a municipal parking lot next door. “I thought it was very weird,” Mr. Bendul said. “I thought it was cloak and dagger. It just struck me as very, very odd. ” Without bothering to change from his golf shirt and jeans, he drove with a deputy into oncoming traffic on the wrong side of the street, sirens blaring. “I was hot,” he said of his demeanor going into the meeting. “Public safety was being compromised. ” Mr. Durando claimed that the lane closings were part of a traffic study, Mr. Bendul recalled. “I told him it was a miserable failure. End it, stop it,” he said, adding that the gridlock was contributing to series of crises: a missing a patient in cardiac arrest, a car accident and numerous complaints of road rage, among other problems. “I told him bluntly that if anybody dies, I’m going to tell those people to sue him and everybody at the Port Authority,” said Mr. Bendul, who described Mr. Durando as “very nervous. ” Mr. Durando told Mr. Bendul that Mr. Sokolich should contact Mr. Baroni. Before their meeting ended, though, Mr. Bendul recalled one last comment from Mr. Durando. “He told me if anybody asked if this meeting occurred, he would deny it,” Mr. Bendul testified. Mr. Sokolich called Mr. Baroni, whom he considered a friend by then he had a photo of the two of them on his office credenza. But his call went unanswered. The next day, upon seeing “a repeat performance” of the previous day’s gridlock, Mr. Sokolich began beseeching Mr. Baroni with an increasingly urgent set of messages. “I’ve got to talk to somebody about this new policy at the bridge it’s truly shutting down Fort Lee,” he said in a voice mail message early that morning, which was played for the jury on Tuesday. “We’re in total gridlock. I’m just trying to figure out who’s mad at me. ” His pleas still unheeded, Mr. Sokolich later texted: “Help please. It’s maddening. ” “The town is ready to revolt,” he implored in another voice mail, before asking once more: “Who’s mad at me?” | 1 |
President Donald Trump’s administration is floating the idea of a 20 percent import tax on Mexico to help pay for a border wall on the U. S. southern border. [White House press secretary Sean Spicer discussed the tax with reporters on the way back from Philadelphia after Trump spoke to both houses of Congress. “If you tax that $50 billion at 20 percent of imports … we can do $10 billion a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone,” he said, pointing out that an import tax would be similar to other countries. The wall would save money, Spicer explained, by slowing down illegal immigration, and reducing the expenses needed for border enforcement. When asked if the American consumer would suffer as a result of such a tax, Spicer argued that the economy would adjust. “I think what its going to do is lift up the wages of American workers as well,” he said. “Right now we have an influx of cheap labor. Its going to put the American consumer back, net net, to make sure the American workers get lifted up as well. ” Spicer clarified afterwards that he was only offering a proposal. “We’ve been asked over and over again ‘how could you possibly do this, there’s now way that Mexico will pay for it,’” he said. “Here’s one way. Boom. Done. ” | 1 |
New York Times: Apologist for Power November 7, 2016
Special Report: Over the past couple of decades, America’s preeminent newspaper, The New York Times, has lost its journalistic way, becoming a propaganda platform and an apologist for the powerful,
In recent years, The New York Times has behaved as if whatever the Establishment claims is true must be true, failing to show thoughtful skepticism whether the findings are coming from a congressional report, an intelligence assessment, a criminal investigation or even an outfit as disreputable as the National Football League.
If some powerful institution asserts a conclusion, the Times falls in line and expects everyone else to do so as well. Yet, that is not journalism; it is mindless submission to authority; and it indirectly pushes many people into the swamps of conspiracy theories. After all, if professional journalists simply ratify whatever dubious claims are coming from powerful institutions, inquisitive citizens will try to fill in the blanks themselves and sometimes buy into outlandishly false speculations. New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)
In my journalistic career, I have found both extremes troubling: the Times’ assumption that the authorities are almost always right and the conspiracy theorists who follow up some “what I can’t understand” comment with a patently absurd explanation and then get angry when rational people won’t go along.
Though both attitudes have become dangerous for a functioning democracy, the behavior of the Times deserves the bulk of the blame, since the “newspaper of record” carries far more weight in setting public policy and also is partly to blame for creating this blight of conspiracism.
Some of the Times’ failures are well known, such as its 2002 front-page acceptance of claims from officials and allies of George W. Bush’s administration that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and had purchased some aluminum tubes to do so. The Times’ bogus story allowed Bush’s top aides to go on Sunday talk shows to warn that “we must not allow the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
But the “aluminum tube” story was only part of a long-developing pattern. As an investigative reporter in Washington since 1980, I had seen the Times engage in similar publications of false stories planted by powerful insiders.
For instance, based on self-serving information from Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department in the mid-1980s, the Times knocked down the original reporting that my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger and I did on Nicaraguan Contra rebels getting involved in cocaine smuggling.
And, once the Times got snookered by its official sources, it and other mainstream publications carried on vendettas against anyone who contradicted the accepted wisdom, unwilling to admit that they were wrong even at the expense of historical truth.
So, when San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb revived the Contra-cocaine story in 1996 — with evidence that some of that cocaine had fed into the “crack epidemic”— the Times (along with other major newspapers) savaged Webb’s articles and destroyed his career.
Finally, in 1998 when the CIA’s Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed that the Contras indeed had engaged in extensive cocaine trafficking, the Times only published a grudging and limited admission that maybe there was a bit more to the story than the vaunted Times had previously accepted. But Webb’s career and life remained in ruins. He eventually committed suicide in 2004 (and please, conspiracists, don’t go on about how he was “murdered” by the CIA).
[For details, Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga .”]
Hiding Gore’s Victory
By the time of Webb’s destruction, the Times was neck-deep in a troubling pattern of getting virtually every major story wrong or sitting on important information that some of its own journalists had dug up. President George W. Bush and members of his national security team in Iraq in 2007
In 2000, after five partisan Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court shut down the vote count in Florida to ensure George W. Bush’s “election,” Times executives resisted calls from lower-level editors to join in a media counting of the discarded votes, only grumpily agreeing to take part.
However, when that vote count was completed in November 2001, the Times executives decided to misreport the findings, which revealed that if all legal votes in Florida had been counted Al Gore would have won (because the so-called “over-votes” – when a voter both marks and writes in the same name – broke heavily for Gore and are legal under Florida law which is based on the clear intent of the voter).
You might have thought that the obvious lede would be that the wrong guy was in the White House, but the 9/11 attacks had intervened between the start and the end of the media recount. So, the Times and other major news organizations buried their own findings so as not to undermine Bush’s authority amid a crisis. The big media focused on various hypotheticals of partial counts that still had Bush “winning.”
While one might sympathize with the Times’ reasons for misleading the public, what the Times did was not journalism, nor was it a case of treating the American citizens as the true sovereigns of the nation who have a right to know the truth. It was a case of protecting the legitimacy of the Establishment. Those of us who noted the actual vote tabulations were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” though we were not.
[For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,” “ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”]
Rationalizing War
So, when we got to Bush’s plans for invading Iraq in 2002, the Times had already shown its commitment to play ball with whatever the government was saying, no matter how dubious the claims. And, even the humiliation of having been caught publishing a false story about aluminum tubes being evidence of Iraq reconstituting its nuclear weapons program didn’t get the Times to change course. Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
Although one of the reporters on that story, Judy Miller, eventually did leave the newspaper (and landed on her feet at Fox News), the lead author, Michael Gordon, continued as the Times’ national security correspondent. Even more stunning, columnist Bill Keller, who wrote an influential article rallying “liberals” to the cause of invading Iraq, was elevated to the top job of executive editor after his Iraq gullibility had been exposed.
Even in the rare moments when the Times claimed it was standing up to the Bush administration, such as publishing James Risen’s article in December 2005 exposing the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the reality was not exactly a new chapter in Profiles in Courage.
It turned out that the Times had been sitting on Risen’s story for more than a year – it could have been published before the 2004 election – but Bush demanded the story’s suppression. The information was finally shared with the public in late 2005 only because Risen’s book, State of War, was scheduled for publication in January 2006 and included the disclosure, a prospective embarrassment for the Times.
The pattern of the Times bowing down to the White House continued into the Obama administration. Whenever there has been a dubious claim that the U.S. government directs against some foreign “adversary,” the Times dutifully takes the side of Official Washington, rather than applying the objectivity and impartiality that are supposed to be at the heart of U.S. journalism.
For instance, on Aug. 21, 2013, when a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus, Syria, killed several hundred people, the Times simply fell in line behind the U.S.-driven rush to judgment blaming the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
There were immediate reasons to doubt that conclusion – Assad had just invited in United Nations inspectors to investigate cases of Syrian jihadists using chemical weapons – but the Times and other major Western outlets simply fingered the already demonized Assad.
Though we now know that U.S. intelligence analysts did not consider Assad’s guilt a “slam dunk” – and later key elements of the case against Assad collapsed , such as the Times’ miscalculation of the maximum range of the sarin-laden rocket – the Assad-did-it stampede almost led to a major U.S. military retaliation against what now appears to have been the wrong people.
Current evidence points to a likely provocation by radical jihadists trying to trick the West into entering the war in a big way on their side, but the Times has never fully retracted its false claim that the rocket was fired from a Syrian military base, which was four times outside the rocket’s range.
Indeed, to this day, Times’ columnists and other Western journalists routinely cite Assad’s guilt – and President Obama’s supposed failure to enforce his “red line” against chemical attacks – as flat fact.
The MH-17 Case
There has been a similar lack of skepticism toward the propaganda case that has been built around the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine killing 298 people. We saw another rush to judgment, this time blaming ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but there were problems with that claim from the start. The Dutch Safety Board’s reconstruction of where it believed the missile exploded near Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014.
I was told by a source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts that their evidence pointed to a rogue element of the Ukrainian military under the direction of a hard-line, anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarch with the hoped-for goal of shooting down Putin’s plane returning from a state visit to South America. According to this account, MH-17 just became the substitute target.
But the international investigation was put under the effective control of Ukraine’s unsavory SBU intelligence service, although technically called “Dutch-led.” As the Joint Investigation Team’s own progress report noted this year, the inquiry relied both on the Ukrainian government’s hospitality and “evidence” supplied by the SBU, which has been implicated in concealing Ukrainian torture centers. Far from objective, the investigation became part of the West’s anti-Russian propaganda war.
So, when the JIT issued its initial findings in September 2016, skepticism should have been in order. Indeed, there wasn’t really a “report” as such, more a brief summary accompanied by several videos that used computer-generated graphics and cryptic telephone intercepts, provided by the SBU, to create the impression of Russian guilt.
A critical examination of the material revealed that the inquiry ignored evidence that went against the desired conclusion , including intercepts revealing that a Ukrainian convoy was pressing deep inside what was called “rebel-controlled” territory, an important point because it showed that a Ukrainian missile battery could have traveled eastward toward the alleged firing point since rebel forces were mostly massed to the north fighting a government offensive.
The alleged route of the supposed Russian Buk battery also made no sense because there was a much more direct and discreet route from the Russian border to the alleged firing location in the southeast than the circuitous wandering all the way west to Donetsk before backtracking to the east. But the SBU-dominated investigation needed to explain why all the “social media” photos showed a Buk battery traveling east toward Russia, not westward from Russia.
And, there was the JIT’s silence on a Dutch intelligence report from October 2015 saying that the only powerful anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, were under the control of the Ukrainian military. Plus, the supposed firing location for the alleged purpose of protecting rebel fighters operating far to the north made no sense from a tactical perspective either. Placing a Buk battery far to the southeast would not help shoot down Ukraine’s military planes firing missiles into the rebel lines.
Indeed, much of the evidence fit better with what I had been told, second-hand, from those U.S. intelligence analysts – because any scheme to shoot down Putin’s plane would need the deniability that would come from pushing the battery as far into “rebel-controlled” territory as possible so as to manage the political fallout by creating a cover story that Putin was killed by his own supporters. The same cover story also would work for killing the passengers on MH-17 and blaming it on Russia.
But whatever you might think about who was responsible for the MH-17 atrocity — and I agree that the mystery has not been solved — the job of a professional news organization is to examine skeptically the various accounts and the available pieces of evidence, not just embrace the “official” version. But that is what the Times has done regarding MH-17 and pretty much every other case.
Concealing History
The Times’ journalistic negligence does not only affect current issues of war and peace, but how the American people understand their recent history. In effect, the false “group thinks” – accepted by the Times – have a long after-life of decay contaminating the public’s thinking whenever the Times recycles a bogus account as historical narrative. President Lyndon Johnson accompanies President-elect Richard Nixon to his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1969.
For instance, in a recent summary of “October Surprise” cases, the Times misled its readers on two of the most important incidents, 1968 and 1980.
Regarding the election of 1968 between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the evidence is now overwhelming that Nixon’s operatives went behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to sabotage the Paris peace talks that Johnson felt could end the Vietnam War, a development that also would likely have helped fellow Democrat Humphrey.
That evidence now includes declassified FBI wiretaps of Nixon’s conspirators and Johnson’s own taped phone conversations – as well as various admissions and other corroborations from participants – but the Times has always turned up its nose toward this important story. So, the history doesn’t exist in New York Times World.
Thus, when the Times addressed this 1968 episode in a Nov. 1, 2016 review of past “October Surprise” cases – in the context of FBI Director James Comey telling Congress that the FBI had reopened its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails – the Times offered this summary:
“President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced a halt to bombing of North Vietnam, based on his claim that peace talks had ‘entered a new and a very much more hopeful phase,’ and he invited the government of South Vietnam and the Viet Cong to take part in negotiations. Raising hopes that the war might end soon, the announcement appeared to bolster the standing in the polls of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the Democratic , but Humphrey still fell short in the election against former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican.”
In other words, the Times treated Johnson’s bombing halt and claim of peace-talk progress as the “October Surprise” to try to influence the election in favor of Humphrey. But the evidence now is clear that a peace agreement was within reach and that the “October Surprise” was Nixon’s sabotage of the negotiations by persuading South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to boycott the Paris meeting.
The Times got the story upside-down and inside-out by failing to reexamine this case in light of convincing evidence now available in the declassified record. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason ’” and “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”]
Reagan’s Victory
The Times botched the 1980 “October Surprise” case even worse. The currently available evidence supports the case that Ronald Reagan’s campaign – mostly through its director (and future CIA Director) William Casey and its vice (and former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush – went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back and undermined his negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran. President Ronald Reagan, delivering his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, as the 52 U.S. hostages in Iran are simultaneously released.
Carter’s failure became a central factor in his repudiation for reelection and a core reason for Reagan’s landslide victory – that also carried the Republicans to control of the U.S. Senate. But the later congressional investigation into the 1980 October Surprise case – a follow-on to the Iran-Contra scandal which exposed the Reagan-Bush secret dealings with Iran – was stymied in 1992.
Naively, the inquiry trusted President George H.W. Bush’s administration to collect the evidence and provide the witnesses for what would amount to Bush’s political suicide. Documents from Bush’s presidential library reveal that his White House quickly set out to “kill/spike this story” in order to protect his reelection chances.
For instance, a memo by one of Bush’s lawyers revealed that the White House had received confirmation of a key October Surprise allegation – a secret trip by Casey to Madrid – but then withheld that information from congressional investigators. Documents also show the White House frustrating attempts to interview a key witness.
After I discovered the Madrid confirmation several years ago – and sent the document to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who had headed the House inquiry which concluded that there was no credible evidence supporting the allegations – he was stunned by the apparent betrayal of his trust.
“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me in an interview. Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the investigation’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was central to the inquiry.
So, a great deal is now known about the 1980 October Surprise case since the Times accepted the misguided conclusion of Hamilton’s inquiry. But none of that is reflected in how the Times recounted the history in its review of past October Surprise cases:
“The Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan, and his aides repeatedly warned that President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, would try an October surprise, probably in the form of winning the release of American hostages held for more than a year in Iran. The Reagan campaign’s frequent use of the term helped popularize it. Some people have since charged that Reagan aides actually tried to prevent a hostage release before the election, through back-channel communications with Iran, a claim that has been widely refuted. The hostages were freed in January 1981 — on the day Reagan was inaugurated.”
Yet, rather than being “widely refuted,” the most recent evidence tends to confirm the allegations that have been made by some two dozen witnesses including a detailed account of the Reagan campaign’s interference by then-Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. But the Times seems more interested in reinforcing the false conventional wisdom than informing the American people.
[For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”]
Crazy Deflategate
Even on more trivial matters, the Times simply can’t escape its pattern of accepting the word from the powerful, even when those powers-that-be are as disreputable as the executives of National Football League. New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady.
When the NFL decided to accuse New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady of cheating in a bizarre scheme to slightly deflate footballs in the January 2015 AFC Championship game, the Times again showed no skepticism despite the flimsiness of the accusations as well as the absence of any direct evidence — and the official denials from Brady (under oath) and two equipment employees.
The so-called Deflategate case was also marred by the sloppiness of the halftime measurements of the footballs and the ignorance of many NFL executives about the laws of physics and how weather affects the internal air pressure of footballs, as determined by the Ideal Gas Law.
But the “scandal” took on a life of its own with the NFL leaking exaggerations about the discrepancies in the initial air-pressure measurements and false claims about the proper air pressure in the footballs of the other team, the Indianapolis Colts (the one accurate gauge, used by the NFL officials, showed that the Colts’ footballs were underinflated for both the first half and second half).
Eventually, even NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recognized many of the flaws in the case as he concluded that the only game where the footballs could have been deflated was the AFC Championship game when the Patriots’ ball boy carried the footballs to the field unattended (rather than the normal practice of being accompanied by an official) and stopped briefly in a bathroom.
But this NFL conspiracy theory – that the ball boy used his bathroom break to slightly deflate footballs rather than urinating as he claimed – made no sense because the only reason the ball boy ended up unattended was because the preceding NFC Championship had gone into overtime and the NFL decided to delay the start of the AFC game so the public could see both games.
The sudden-death ending of the NFC game caused confusion among the officials and the ball boy took it upon himself to take the balls to the field.
To suggest that Brady somehow anticipated that series of unlikely events so a tiny bit of air could be removed from the footballs, which would have no discernible effect except to make the balls travel slightly slower and thus easier to defend, is absurd on its face.
But the NFL would have lost face by admitting that it had acted so absurdly – and rival owners saw a chance to damage the Patriots’ ability to compete – so the Deflategate story moved on with Brady suspended for four games and the Patriots stripped of two valuable draft choices.
A Puff Piece
While you might say that this “scandal” surely didn’t deserve the attention that it got (and you’d be right), the Times, which treated the NFL claims as fact, didn’t let go even after Brady dropped his appeals and accepted his four-game suspension. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell
The Times devoted 2½ pages on Sept. 25, 2016, to a puff piece by correspondent John Branch about the “Deflategate Scientists” from the corporate-friendly science firm, Exponent, which was hired by the NFL to produce the “science” to justify Brady’s punishment.
Though Exponent discovered that all or virtually all the air-pressure drop could be attributable to the cold, wet weather on the night of the game (and the imprecise process of the halftime measurements further muddled the picture), Exponent still composed some scientific-sounding jargon to give the NFL the cover that it needed to go after Brady.
The firm said, “we conclude that within the range of game characteristics most likely to have occurred on Game Day, we have identified no set of credible environmental or physical factors that completely accounts for the additional loss of air pressure exhibited by the Patriots game balls as compared to the loss in air pressure exhibited by the Colts game balls.”
But Exponent’s phrasing obscured the fact that an innocent explanation did exist on Exponent’s range of measurements though the firm ruled it out by applying “accepted error margins” and fudging the facts around the sequence of the football testing at halftime (a key point because in a warmer environment, the air pressure would rise naturally).
Armed with Exponent’s phrasing, NFL investigators then took some unrelated text messages from the two equipment employees describing how NFL officials had over-inflated footballs in a prior game to claim they had the “smoking gun” regarding a plot to under-inflate footballs.
However, rather than show any skepticism about this “evidence” and the larger absurdity of the Deflategate claims, the Times simply treated the NFL’s case as solid and fawned over Exponent as if it were a temple of noble scientists seeking nothing but the truth. The Times dismissed critics who cited the firm’s reputation as a hired-gun to give powerful industries useful conclusions, such as disparaging the danger from second-hand cigarette smoke.
Instead of any serious journalism examining Deflategate’s logical flaws and Exponent’s dubious role in the scandal-mongering, the Times presented Exponent as the real martyrs in the case, reporting “Exponent still receives emails from adamant critics, and its role in Deflategate has cost it several prospective clients, the company said.”
A Troubling Pattern
Granted, the Deflategate silliness is minor compared to other cases when the Times misrepresented key chapters of U.S. history, concealed government wrongdoing and generated propaganda used to justify wars. But all these examples point to a pattern of journalistic behavior that is not journalistic.
Today’s Times is not the brave newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War. It is no longer the place where a Seymour Hersh could expose the CIA’s “crown jewels” of scandals or where a Raymond Bonner could reveal massacres of civilians by U.S.-backed militaries in Central America.
Not that those earlier days were by any means perfect – and not that there isn’t some quality journalism that still appears in the newspaper – but it is hard to imagine the Times today going against the grain in any significant or consistent way.
Instead, the Times has become an apologist for the powerful, conveying to its readers and to the world a dangerous and dubious insistence that the Establishment knows best.
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Next Swipe left/right A brutal spoof advert for the new Macbook that highlights everything it doesn’t have What if instead of useful features, your shiny new laptop has less stuff that before? You need a 2016 Macbook Pro! | 0 |
Here is a review of some of the latest significant e-mails and a bit of background behind the story. We are now close to 38,000+ emails released by WikiLeaks. By White House UFO
General William Neil McCasland, former head of the WPAFB lab where it is believed the Roswell wreckage went, makes comments on how to deal with UFO disclosure.
“I was thinking a bit more about what a White House memo should say. Something like these points to all Federal Agencies: – In light of the President’s policy on STEM (citing official policy encouraging the study of science, technology, engineering and math) – some back ground on your project – the Administration encourages a favorable Public Affairs position by all Agencies – appointes NASA to lead (this kind of public outreach is in NASA’s job jar, and if no Agency is appointed all will simply note and file the memo and likely do nothing) – and to coordinate with DoD, DNI and NOAA (the other major space actors, putting a bit of light on them)”
General William N. McCasland
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33739
Two Key New Podesta UFO Emails Studying them Now
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33552
Tom DeLonge speaking to Podesta about Rolling Stone Magazine, “They don’t know yet where you exist in this Sekret Machines Universe (we launch the story with NY Times with Doc Trailer in a week) and they already look to you in a leadership role they can trust. And care almost ONLY about your voice in this.”
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33739
DeLonge again speaking to Podesta
“The ranking General (probably William N. McCasland) on my committee has some ideas for a memo that would help provide context for his and the other Officers work on this project.”
Also two new WikiLeaks Podesta UFO emails about Edgar Mitchell https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33722
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33713
In late September 2015, John Podesta posted a tweet asking actress Lena Dunham to ask Hillary Clinton about the aliens the next time she did an interview. This led to a situation where the Clinton campaign was waiting for some reporter to ask about aliens.Nothing would happen until late December when New Hampshire reporter Daymond Steer asked, but on November 5th Hillary was on the late night Jerry Kimmel show. One leaked email points out that Hillary was waiting for the UFO question and had practised an answer. The question didn’t happen and Hillary was very disappointed. In a reply to a query by Podesta asking how the Kimmel show went Kristina Schake, who job in the Clinton campaign is to remake Hillary’s image as she had done for Michelle Obama, told Podesta,
She was charming, got lots of laughs and worked in a lot of message, including climate change. He didn’t end up asking her about UFOs! She was very disappointed. She practiced UAPs for 5 minutes beforehand.
Hillary would appear again on the Kimmel show in March 2016 and did get the UFO question during that appearance. Unfortunately, the five minutes practise did not help as she called UAPs “unexplained aerial phenomena” instead of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Hillary on Jimmy Kimmel Show
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/7734
New Names Dragged Down the UFO Rabbit HoleIn Late December 2015 reporter Daymond Steer in Conway, New Hampshire took up John Podesta’s challenge to ask Hillary Clinton about the aliens. It created a story that went around the world.Now we are seeing the first reaction to that news story in the Podesta emails. In a WikiLeaks email on January 7, 2016 Ann M. O’Leary, a senior policy advisor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign writes Podesta; “Judge Tatel & John – This article on Hillary’s comments about extraterrestrial life made me think of you two and remind me to connect you.
Judge David Tatel
John – As I was telling David the last time I saw him, the two of you are the biggest believers in ET life who I know and I think you’d enjoy talking with one another. I know that neither of you have much time, but I think you’d have a fascinating time discussing it if you ever get together! Warmly, Ann”
Ann M. O’Leary with Hillary Clinton
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/29385
On April 30, 2015 Terri Mansfield wrote John Podesta. There are two significant things to nhttps://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/29385ote,
1. Terri is requesting a meeting between Astronaut Edgar Mitchell and President Obama after the planned one on one meeting with John Podesta (arrangements were being made for this meeting but it never took place).
2. More importantly, Terri tells Podesta “Edgar has consulted on consciousness matters for American presidents in the past.” This is significant because consciousness is the key to the UFO mystery. There are some hints that the main man behind the present “group” working to disclose knew the “holographic consciousness” connection.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/27026
After Podesta made his now infamous tweet that his biggest disappointment of 2014 was not getting disclosure of the UFO files he started to receive some email inquiries for interviews.
In one leaked email he tells his assistant to tell the reporter from NPR in Wisconsin that he can’t do the interview, and ignore the rest of the requests.
One of the emails he gets ins from Robert Fish who wrote a book on the recovery of the Apollo 11 capsule in the Pacific Ocean. It was originally sent to researcher Leslie Ken. When she did not reply, Fish sent it to Podesta. Fish indicated that everyone is looking in the wrong location for the UFO In a second email from Bob Fish, who wrote the book on the recovery of the Apollo 11 capsule in the pacific, he tells Podesta of things he had heard such as
“No one could get into the cafeteria without TS/SCI clearances, so this was not a “’lightweight group of gossipers.’ One of these times, a member of that group was really excited – said they’d just picked up Fastwalker…”
Fish wrote more of the reality of UFOs that he had experienced in his career in a March 6, 2015 email;
“In that same TS/SCI building cafeteria in El Segundo, I had lunch with a senior USAF NCO who had worked for Project Blue Book in the 1970s (after it had been “officially disbanded). He was an ELINT technician (electronic intelligence) who flew in RC-135s from MacDill AFB in Florida. The “normal” target was Cuba where they did lots of snooping and sometimes challenging the Cubans to turn on radar and other systems. He said there were times when they were diverted from these missions to track UFOs off the east coast of Florida. His claim was they UFOs had a landing and takeoff spot in the ocean east of Miami, north of Bermuda.
He also claimed there was a specific electronic signature (frequency) emanating from them when they were going into or coming out of the water, so they were easy to track. On several occasions, they filmed the UFO as it transitioned from water to air or vice versa. One last item is he was occasionally assigned to fly in a USAF weather aircraft (WC-135) when they had a hurricane hunting mission over the usual UFO area, where his specific assignment was kept secret from the other crew members. He would always report back to a dedicated USAF intelligence officer on base when they returned from a mission. He did not know where the intel that he collected was sent for processing or storage (WPAFB in Dayton would be the obvious choice). High quality film of UFOs is “out there” somewhere!
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31721
On Feb 5, 2016, John Podesta wrote to his assistant proposing a tweet to be made in reply to the news that astronaut Edgar Mitchell had died.
John Podesta wrote: We should tweet something like Sad to learn of the passing of Edgar Mitchell, an American hero. Ck his Wikipedia page to make sure that won’t seem too goofy. He’s A big UFO guy. Former astronaut.
Edgar Mitchell
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31715
One thing that has been overlooked in the coverage of the Podesta/Hillary WikiLeaks UFO story is the people who are being copied by John Podesta.
In the emails where John has received UFO questions, he has either copied or asked for input from the following people from the presidential campaign or from the Institute for American Progress that Podesta founded. (One estimate stated that 40% of the high-level officials in the Obama administration came from this institute). Take a close at the names. These are not people off the street.
[email protected] – She left the Obama administration with Podesta in February 2015.
She previously served as White House Communications Director for U.S. President Barack Obama. Prior to her service at the White House, she served as the President of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Jennifer Palmieri is Director of Communications for the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential
campaign where she handles she manages candidate message, media relations–and trouble-shooting.
[email protected] – Faiz Shakir is the vice-president of the Center for American Progress (CAP). Shakir, in fact, sent Podesta an article about UFO secrecy already back in 2008.
Daniella Leger is a Senior Vice President for Communications and
Strategy at Center for American Progress
[email protected] – Sarah Latham is the Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign – Special Assistant to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Presidential Scheduling from 1996 to 2000
Ken Gude – Gude is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress specializing in civil liberties and terrorism.
Ken Gude
Ian Millhiser – Millhiser is a Policy Analyst for the Center for American Progress, the think tank created by Podesta. Millhiser’s work focuses on government efficiency and transparency.
Ian Millhiser
As of October 26, there are 14 emails to and from John Podesta attempting to arrange a meeting between astronaut Edgar Mitchell with Podesta and/or President Obama. The topic of the proposed meeting would be Zero-point energy and UFO disclosure. The two latest released emails were sent by Terri Mansfield on January 21, 2015.
Terri Mansfield
The first letter (sent through Podesta assistant Eyrn Sepp) mentioned an article just published by USA Today which pointed out that nearly 130,000 pages of declassified UFO records from Project Blue Book had just been put on-line. Edgar’s letter stated,
I grew up in Roswell, my family knew Oppenheimer. Let’s get our meeting time and date set up ASAP so we can move forward on our unprecedented discussion concerning disclosure of our ETI from a contiguous universe and their connection to zero-point energy for humanity.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32937
The second letter written later in the day was a more specific request for a meeting. Although the email mentions Podesta “no longer with the White House” Podesta was still at the White House for almost another month when he produced his famous tweet saying he had “once again” not been able to release the UFO documents. It may have been that he had given notice to leave and Edgar had become aware of this,
Now that you are no longer serving in the White House, I write to you and Eryn requesting our face to face meeting to discuss zero-point energy and Disclosure. Our Quantrek science intuitive has provided us with a few facts about our nonviolent contiguous universe ETI who promote PACIFISM among humans and with whom we work:
1. All true ETI do not inhabit this universe.
2. So-called ETIs inhabit this universe and are in fact just celestials. They are higher in rank then discarnate spirits, even those who are evolved, HOWEVER, THEY JUST MIRROR VIOLENCE ON EARTH, FEELING THREATENED BY CONTAMINATION OF THEIR ABODE.
3. Extrauinversal ETIs on the other hand have long ago evolved past violence, relying on spiritual intelligence to avert destruction.
4. The Phoenix Lights and other sightings have provided ample evidence that Earth has been visited by beings whose intention is purely peace and who have nonviolently hovered over Phoenix and other sites, waiting to be asked to help, when they could most easily have destroyed the city with their uses of consciousness. These sightings have been witnessed by thousands of people in Phoenix alone, including my colleague Terri Mansfield, who will accompany me on our meeting with you.
Please let me now three dates and times that would work for your schedule.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32833
This followed an email that had been sent by Mitchell, and again sent by Terri Mansfield a week earlier. In that email Mitchell requested a meeting on zero-point energy and UFO disclosure with Podesta after he leaves in February 2015.
That letter was also significant in that Edgar bring up meeting a childhood friend of President Obama. Edgar wrote,
I met with President Obama’s Honolulu childhood friend, US Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto on July 4 at the US Mission in Geneva, when I was able to tell her briefly about zero-point energy. I believe we can enlist her as a confidante and resource in our presentation for President Obama.
Pamela Hamamoto
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1766
On March 5, 2016 Eric Brys wrote an email to John Podesta titled “Extraterrestrial Disclosure.” It was written two days after Podesta granted an interview to KLAS-TV in Las Vegas Nevada where he talked about the fact that unlike Bill Clinton and Obama he had convinced Hillary to disclose information being withheld about UFOs. In that interview Podesta stated,
I’ve talked to Hillary about that. There are still classified files that could be declassified. I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can, so that people have their legitimate questions answered. More attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people — who are in public life, who are serious about this — being ridiculed.
In his email Brys complimented Podesta on his disclosure effort,
I am proud of your continued efforts to disclose the truth of secret UFO files hidden from the public. I will be voting for Hillary Clinton to help get you the authority you need to obtain disclosure. I hope history remembers your undaunting efforts to informing the American public about extraterrestrial visitation.
Unlike most of the UFO emails from ordinary citizens that were not responded to Podesta took the time to answer. He stated,
Thanks for your support. We will keep at it.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33010
There is correspondence today between John Podesta and his aide Milia Fisher that took place the day before the big January 25, 2016 google hangout meeting where Podesta talked UFO disclosure with the following three men: Major General Neil McCasland, former head of the foreign technology back-engineering laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB, Robert F. Weiss, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Aeronautics Advanced Development Programs, Lockheed Martin Corporation (Skunkworks), and Major General Michael J. Carey, USAF, the Special Assistant to the Commander, Air Force Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.
The correspondence the day before the meeting indicated that they were expecting Tom DeLonge but his flight had been cancelled. It appears then that DeLonge was scheduled to be with Podesta in and around the time of the meeting. New emails may clear this up.
Tom DeLonge
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/28403
Jairam Ramesh an Indian economist and politician belonging to Indian National Congress. He is a Member of Parliament representing Andhra Pradesh state in the Rajya Sabha since June 2004. In July 2011, Jairam Ramesh was elevated to the Union Council of Ministers of India and appointed Minister of Rural Development and Minister (additional charge) of the new Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. However, in the cabinet reshuffle in October 2012, he has been divested of the portfolio of Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. He was previously the Indian Minister of State (Independent Charge) at the Ministry of Environment and Forests from May 2009 to July 2011.
He was cool with Podesta’s UFO beliefs. He discovered this after the now famous UFO tweet by Podesta as he leaves the Obama administration to head the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Jairam Ramesh
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/25421
Kind of cool internal Clinton campaign dialog about Podesta contacting John Glenn about Mars. The subject was “Re: signs of water / life on Mars – should JDP tweet to John Glenn ??
”The one staffer added “time to send a man or WOMAN ?”
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/24888
Source: White House UFO
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A lawsuit brought before a Maryland appeals court seeking to stop President Trump’s temporary ban on new visas from six Middle Eastern countries was filed by a group financed by billionaire George Soros. [The second group behind the lawsuit was massively funded by the federal government under the Obama administration to resettle refugees within the U. S. On Monday, Bloomberg reported on the status of the lawsuit: The appeals court on Monday offered to accelerate its review of the case, which would speed it along to the U. S. Supreme Court by skipping the traditional oral argument before three judges in favor of an initial hearing. The parties have until March 30 to decide if they want that accelerated schedule. The suit before the appeals court was filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project, HIAS, a refugee resettlement group established in the 19th century to aid Eastern European Jews, the Middle East Studies Association of North America and six individuals. Similar to the current suit, the International Refugee Assistance Project was also a signatory to a lawsuit filed last January attempting to block Trump’s original executive order halting visas for 90 days for “immigrants and ” from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Iran and Iraq. The International Refugee Assistance Project is located at the Urban Justice Center. The Urban Justice Center is also the recipient of an Open Society grant. Taryn Higashi, executive director of the Center’s International Refugee Assistance Project listed in the Trump lawsuit, currently serves on the Advisory Board of the International Migration Initiative of Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The other group signed on to the lawsuit is the nonprofit HIAS, which describes itself as standing “for a world in which refugees find welcome, safety and freedom. ” Unmentioned in much of the news media coverage about the lawsuit is that HIAS has taken large sums in federal grants to help resettle refugees, as this reporter previously documented. HIAS specializes in refugee resettlement and in 2015 received 65. 3 percent of its annual $25 million budget from government grants. Annual grants include funds from the State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. Another major donor is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2015, the State Department provided $17, 663, 704 and the Department of Health and Human Services gave another $2, 765, 195. The fiscal year 2014 saw a $16, 959, 850 State Department grant and $2, 546, 469 in funds from the Department of Health and Human Services. Guidestar documented that in 2013, HIAS received $16, 261, 661 from government and intergovernmental agencies and took in a total of $31, 218, 870 in revenue. In 2012, $14, 707, 399 in government grants were donated to HIAS and the organization produced $27, 677, 240 in revenue. In 2008, the Committee on Organizations, a division of the UN Economic and Social Council, officially accepted HIAS as an accredited NGO. HIAS openly states on its website that it is the “only Jewish organization designated by the federal government to undertake” refugee resettlement, which “lies at the heart of HIAS’ work. ” The group is partners with local Refugee Assistance Organizations around the country to “ensure successful integration. ” “Although this can be a long process requiring the participation of many actors, refugees bring the resilience and resourcefulness that saved their lives at home,” HIAS relates. HIAS was an acronym that previously stood for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and it originally worked to resettle Jewish emigrants from Russia. It dropped the full title and only goes by the acronym now. Mark Hetfield, HIAS president and CEO, told the Washington Jewish Week in December 2014 the word “Hebrew” was exclusionary and outdated, comparing it with the use of the word “colored” to refer to African Americans. Soros, meanwhile, has reportedly provided some $76 million for immigrant issues over the last decade alone. In 2014, the New York Times credited “immigrant rights groups” financed by Soros and a handful of other donors with influencing President Obama’s immigration policy. The newspaper reported: When President Obama announces major changes to the nation’s immigration enforcement system as early as next week, his decision will partly be a result of a campaign of pressure by immigrant rights groups, which have grown from a cluster of lobbying organizations into a national force. A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the past decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally. In August, Breitbart Jerusalem first reported hacked documents from Soros’s Open Society Institute boasted that the billionaire and his foundation helped to successfully press the Obama administration into increasing to 100, 000 the total number of refugees taken in by the U. S. annually. The documents revealed that the billionaire personally sent President Obama a letter on the issue of accepting refugees. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. With research by Brenda J. Elliott and Joshua Klein. | 1 |
2016 elections by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Adebayo
The major parties are more concerned with preserving their duopoly than with defeating each other. So-called “progressives” help preserve duopoly rule, failing “to understand that as long as they are complicit with the Democrats, they have no power.” Most people are actually more Green than Democratic in their views, but “have a hard time comprehending that there are more than two parties,” according to Green candidate Dr. Flowers. Margaret Flowers’ Retrospective on Running as a Green for the U.S. Senate by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Adebayo
“ The message of the Green Party resonates with people because we talk about real issues that they experience in their lives and solutions that they want to see.”
The Democratic and Republican parties’ attempt to monopolize the presidential media cycle was challenged by candidates like Dr. Margaret Flowers, who ran for the US Senate on the Green Party ticket in Maryland. She used the electoral platform to speak directly to working class communities. Dr Flowers was profiled in a recent BAR article regarding the decision of the Maryland League of Women Voters to deny her the right to participate in the only televised senatorial debate. Undaunted, Dr. Flowers took to the stage and demanded to be recognized as an equal participate in the electoral process. She was escorted off stage by security forces under protest with audience members shouting: “Let her speak!”
Margaret is a Maryland pediatrician and mother of three. In 2007, she made the decision to stop practicing clinical medicine, which she viewed as antithetical to the welfare of working class and front line communities. Instead, she decided to “practice political medicine.” The class dynamics of health care is evident to her. “The wealth divide is one of our biggest health care problems” and is the cause of “the greatest disparity” in health outcomes. In 2009, she joined Physicians for a National Health Program, becoming a Congressional Fellow and opening a chapter in Maryland. She was arrested at a Senate Roundtable on Health Insurance for speaking on behalf of the single payer option. Margaret said in an interview: “our first goal was to have a seat at the table….If we couldn’t get a seat, at least we could expose the insincerity of the current attempt at healthcare reform and show that single payer was actively being excluded.”
Margaret views the struggle for health care as “part of a broader social, racial, economic and environmental justice movement.” She has organized campaigns to fight for state and federal single payer health care systems. In addition, Margaret provided leadership and took on corporations focusing on the issue of net neutrality, the concept that everyone should have equal access to the Internet regardless of their usage or ability to pay.
I met Margaret during the Freedom Plaza Occupy Movement in Washington, DC where she helped me organize the Occupy EPA demonstrations.
Below, Margaret provides her reflections and analysis on running as the 2016 Green Party candidate for the US Senate in Maryland.
Adebayo: What political and cultural lessons did you learn from running against the Democratic and Republican machines?
Flowers: Running for office in Maryland taught me that the major political party machines, especially the Democratic Party, are pervasive in our state. Their tentacles reach deep into the non-profit organizations, the media, the polling organizations and the universities.
There is a culture in the state that is trapped in the duopoly. People are so used to thinking in terms of just Democrats and Republicans that they have a hard time comprehending that there are more than two parties. It is almost like a habit. When confronted with the reality that the media, non-profits, polls and universities were excluding our campaign, the most common responses were that this is how it has always been or that they excluded us because they could.
It was disappointing that the Maryland League of Women Voters, which is supposed to be nonpartisan and educate voters about their choices on the ballot, imposed an arbitrary high polling criterion that was used to keep me out of debates. It was disappointing that a public university, the University of Baltimore, which sponsored the only televised senate debate in Maryland, shut down political discourse by excluding me even though I would have provided a perspective that was not heard in the debate.
It was interesting to see how the media and polling organizations create a Catch-22 situation for alternative party candidates. Early on in my campaign, when public pressure was applied, the Baltimore Sun published one article on my campaign that mostly argued that I had no chance of winning and that I was mostly like a Democrat. Their failure to cover my campaign early on, or to even mention that I was running when they covered the other candidates, made it less likely that I would reach potential donors and volunteers. This made it less likely that I would poll well, especially since there were few polls that included me and they were done in September. As a result, my low polling numbers were used to justify my exclusion from events.
When our campaign did reach people, we received a very welcoming response. People are interested in a broader discussion of the crises we are facing and solutions to them. The solutions that I support are widely supported by the public.
And finally, it was interesting to see how so-called progressive organizations are trapped inside the Democratic Party and fail to understand that as long as they are complicit with the Democrats, they have no power. They fail to understand that their undying support for Democrats basically means that they are taken for granted. Unfortunately, “progressive” organizations endorsed Van Hollen and Clinton, even though their platforms include support for fracking and war and only partial solutions to the crises in education, healthcare and other human rights violations. This support and undying commitment of so-called “progressive” organizations to the Democratic Party defies logic.
Adebayo: In your opinion, how can the Green Party use the momentum of your state campaign as well as the national Stein/Baraka campaign to create a more effective popular grass-roots movement?
Flowers: It is already happening. New Green Party locals are forming around the state of Maryland. The current locals are growing. Many of the people who are involved in the locals are also involved in advocacy and activism, so there is a natural synergy. It is our task now to continue to nurture and grow that for the next election and to encourage greater collaboration and visibility of the Green Party with local movements.
Personally, my next focus will be to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We are organizing to stop it from being ratified by Congress after the election. If we stop that, it will be a huge victory of popular power over corporate power. We can build off that to encourage more people to rise up and demand that the political agenda protect people and the planet.
Adebayo: How do third party organizations, such as the Green Party, fight the political, financial and media dominance of the two major corporate parties?
Flowers: This is a David and Goliath fight, but we have truth and justice on our side. The message of the Green Party resonates with people because we talk about real issues that they experience in their lives and solutions that they want to see. We are working to expose the media blackout and to encourage people to demand that the media and debates are more inclusive. And we are learning to use social media platforms to reach people. One aspect of the campaign that is very heartening is the commitment of the volunteers. People are donating their skills in filmmaking and graphic design. People are doing regular outreach and visibility actions across the state. It is truly amazing and it energizes me to see it.
Adebayo: As you reflect on your Senate campaign, what strategies worked best to encourage activism and what stratagems could you have employed to elicit more public support?
Flowers: Running a statewide campaign is a challenge. Some of the best experiences that I had were doing one-on-one outreach around the state. I would definitely do more of that if I ran again. And holding volunteer training sessions is critical for people to develop comfort with outreach strategies. I am sure that there is more that I could do, but at this point I am still focused on completing this campaign. Then we will debrief more. Dr. Marsha Adebayo is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated: No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA . She worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered South African vanadium mine workers. Marsha's successful lawsuit led to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet and serves on the Advisory Board of ExposeFacts.com. | 0 |
Neon AK-47: How young Russian guns celebrate Halloween (PHOTOS) Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 20:40 Get short URL © artemiypanarin / Instagram While it’s common for athletes to post pictures on social media of themselves dressed in their Halloween costumes, young Russian National Hockey League players surely add a taste of their homeland to their outfits.
Chicago Blackhawks’ youngster Artemi Panarin posed with a neon AK-47, alongside his teammate and fellow Russian Artem Anisimov, who is wearing a skull painted on his face. Фото опубликовано @artemiypanarin Окт 26 2016 в 11:16 PDT
Arguably the biggest NHL star, Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals was dressed as a prisoner, with Russian gangster-style slicked back hair, while his wife, model Nastya Shubskaya, was his guardian cop. Фото опубликовано Nastasiya Ovechkina (@nastyashubskaya) Окт 23 2016 в 6:51 PDT
Another of the Capitals’ Russian stars, Evgeny Kuznetsov, was spotted in teammate Nate Schmidt’s Instagram post, wearing an Air Force flight suit. Schmidt was also clad in a flight suit, but no telling who was Maverick and who was Goose in the ‘Top Gun’-style get-ups. Фото опубликовано Nate Schmidt (@nateschmidt88) Окт 23 2016 в 8:33 PDT
Another “prisoner and cop” couple was found in Edmonton, with the Oilers’ Anton Slepyshev and his wife Julia. Фото опубликовано ANTON SLEPYSHEV (@anton.slepyshev) Окт 24 2016 в 9:35 PDT
The New York Rangers’ young forward Pavel Buchnevich dressed as Jack the Sparrow of popular film series ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. | 0 |
October 26, 2016
In a further blow to the BBC, the hippos swimming in a circle who appear before the BBC news today confirmed they had signed a deal with the National Geographic channel.
“I know some will see this as a betrayal,” said Edna, spokeshippo for the group. “But you have to realise, the career of a performing hippo isn’t long, and we have to think of our futures.”
It’s thought their new role will focus less on synchronised swimming and more on traditional hippo behaviours, such as wallowing in mud and gaping angrily at each other in disputes over mating rights and territory.
“It’s all a bit vulgar, really,” Edna continued. “We’re the best of friends in real life. But it’s what the public want, so what can you do?”
Meanwhile Rex, spokesdog for the sheepdogs who run round a circular slalom course before the news, shifted uneasily when asked if he could ever be tempted away from the BBC by people offering him biscuits or telling him he was a good boy.
“Look, it’s not up to us, is it? The shepherds whistle and point, we just go where we’re told,” he added, before running off after a squirrel. YaBasta | 0 |
Democrats are consoling themselves by claiming Donald Trump’s election is illegitimate, but they’ll do themselves and the nation a favor if they consider their own faults — including the corruption in their own party and political strategy. [1. The Democrats’ rigged primary: Democrats should begin by accepting the obvious truth of a rigged primary revealed by WikiLeaks. The party’s key leaders — not the party’s voters — picked and promoted Hillary Clinton, meaning she was secretly coronated before the primary ever began. Her rival Bernie Sanders never had a chance. The “nomination” contest was theater designed to make Sanders voters accept Clinton. His voters ought to be furious at Sanders for playing along with this farce, which he most certainly did. When Party elders shriek about nefarious Russian interference in the election process, they’re trying to distract from what the leaked DNC emails actually said, and the fact that we now know those emails are 100 percent genuine, despite early Democrat statements to the contrary. One of those shrieking claims came from Donna Brazile, who was directly involved in doctoring a primary debate by leaking questions to Clinton, not to Sanders. 2. The Democrat superdelegate system: Then there’s the openly rigged element of the Democratic primary, the superdelegate system. It is a political instrument specifically designed to shut down insurgencies and make the interests of Democrat voters secondary to the judgment of party elites, and the powerful lobbyists who manipulate them. Hillary Clinton was chosen by donors who had already spent a fortune currying favor with her, as demonstrated by the instantaneous collapse of the Clinton “charities” the instant the Clintons had no more favors to sell. 3. The Democrat money machine: Building a titanic campaign war chest was the paramount concern of the Democrats in 2016, because they thought it — and their media allies — would give them an unbreakable headlock over the public debate. So Joe Biden was told he could not afford to get into the race. Same for Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who barely raised enough cash to pay for a Philly cheese sandwich. Their financial kneecapping allowed Clinton to suck up hundreds of millions in campaign cash, sometimes in legally questionable ways, even as she railed against the influence of money in politics. 4. The media was part of Clinton’s campaign: It’s fun to watch Democrats wail about Russian spies using WikiLeaks to influence the election, when it’s clear the mainstream media was able to downplay the actual contents of those emails enough to keep most voters in the dark. Sure, outfits like Breitbart News did everything we could to report those revelations, but that’s nothing compared to the influence wielded by the establishment media when it gets a “narrative” avalanche rolling. Of course the establishment media was an active participant in the rigged primary scandal. Those leaked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta reflected very, very poorly on the press. That’s something Democrats could fix — there’s no reason for illegitimate coordination between their candidates and the media. Democrat voters also should demand an end to the incestuous relationship between the media and Democratic politics because it has become as much a liability. Sure, it’s helpful to have the media in your hip pocket, but the value of that advantage is severely degraded when the public knows about it, and has lost faith in the establishment press as a result. Worse, the media enabled a weak, candidates like Clinton to capture the Party nomination. 5. The law was bent and broken to keep Clinton in the game: Democrat voters also should be questioning the legitimacy of Clinton’s nomination because the rule of law was corrupted to preserve her political viability. Her candidacy should have ended when the email server story broke. (Really, it should have ended with the publication of Clinton Cash, but the Democrats incorrectly believed their controlled media could insulate her from the fallout of those astounding revelations.) The politicized Obama Justice Department did Democrats no favors by staving off indictments that would have taken Clinton out of the game, or by the email investigation until her replacement became prohibitively difficult. The Obama administration perfected tactics for dragging scandal investigations out until they became “old news,” but they miscalculated and prolonged Clinton’s email scandal until it blew up like a string of demolition charges throughout the 2016 election. Before they began howling about Russian espionage, Democrats were pushing the narrative that FBI Director James Comey sabotaged Clinton’s election hopes by speaking at length about her “extremely careless” actions when he announced no charges would be recommended, and then kneecapped her again by reviving the Clinton investigation briefly during the last days of the presidential campaign. As with their narrative about WikiLeaks, Democrats are complaining that Clinton was “sabotaged” because people revealed the truth about her. They’re saying their presidential candidate could only win if damaging facts were concealed, false media narratives were perpetuated, and special exemptions from the law were granted to her. That sounds like the very definition of an illegitimate candidacy. 6. Democrats try to hack the electorate: We might also challenge the legitimacy of a political strategy that relies so heavily upon using immigration to hack the demographics of the American electorate. Before Clinton’s defeat shocked them into silence, liberal analysts were beginning to churn out a fresh wave of “Emerging Democratic Majority” pieces about how GOP voters would never win a national election again. One of the reasons Democrats subjected the Electoral College to one of their tantrums is that the EC makes it harder for them to hack the presidential vote with mass immigration. That’s the true significance of the observation that Clinton’s “victory” came entirely from California. Before the 2016 election went down, it was commonly observed that Republicans might have won the previous two presidential contests if they were still running with Ronald Reagan’s electorate this observation was used to mock Trump as foolish for pursuing an obsolete electoral strategy that could never work in the new, America. That observation also lies behind the Democrats’ decision to downplay the economic concerns of struggling Americans, and to largely ignore the distastefully electorates of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in favor of outreach to immigrants, racial subgroups, gays, professionals, unmarried women, and other element of the ‘Emerging Democratic Majority.’ If Democrats didn’t believe they had a reserve army of immigrant voters for Clinton, they might have nominated Biden or Sanders to instead win ordinary Americans to their side. Amusingly, if those immigrants didn’t exist, American voters’ incomes would be higher — and fewer would have been angry enough to shift their votes to the GOP’s candidate. To sum it all up, everything about Clinton’s nomination and campaign stinks to high heaven. That’s why Democrats should try to reform their own corrupt party before they lose again in 2020, if only because they can’t overthrow the Constitution or persuade the military to install their next candidate. As President Barack Obama would say if the shoe was on the other foot, reform of the Democratic Party is the legitimate thing to do. As for Republicans, they know that there are many other techniques that Democrats use to hack the electorate, including the Democrats’ control over the media and education systems. That’s why Republicans should work hard and fast to disable all of them, permanently, because they have a sworn duty to protect the legitimacy of our voting system. | 1 |
By Sarah Jones on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016 at 1:56 pm On Saturday, the press began to figure out that they had been conned by Republicans again, but not before the Clinton email news lead in swing state newspapers. Share on Twitter Print This Post
On Saturday, the press began to figure out that they had been conned by Republicans again, but not before the Clinton email news lead in swing state newspapers.
The “Clinton email” news leads in “almost every single one of the big swing state papers this morning,” observes Politico reporter Gabriel Debenedetti. The Clinton email news leads almost every single one of the big swing state papers this morning … pic.twitter.com/t3rEOwHNmM
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) October 29, 2016
The “FBI investigation!!!!” spread like wildfire last night. This is the result of the press, once again, taking Republican smoke and claiming there’s fire.
This observation isn’t mine along. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out that there is only an upside and no penalty for doing this — for both Republicans and the press: This is how GOP hype-ahead-of-the-facts gets rewarded by media's willful perpetuation of smoke/fire effect. Zero penalty. Only upside. https://t.co/vm0ZLTrACL
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) October 29, 2016
Even though early polling shows there hasn’t been an impact in swing states , and even though the majority of Americans have already made up their minds, each time her emails are brought up Hillary Clinton falls in the polls.
A Gallup poll showed that “emails” are the most Americans have heard about Clinton. Not that she is the most qualified candidate in modern history or how her policy on paid family leave might impact them — but the emails that she was already cleared on.
Even though one result of the Comey letter has been to energize Clinton supporters , at a time when she was facing a likely win that can create complacency, this still isn’t an acceptable practice.
Republican FBI Director James Comey finds himself in the hot seat today after sending a letter that has no precedent, obviously would impact an election that was then just 11 days out and is now 10 days out, and actually bore no information– well, that’s inaccurate. The letter bore inaccurate smoke and innuendo that has already been cleared, but the damage has already been done.
While Ron Fournier and others suggested that Democratic objections to this unprecedented violation of the rules by Comey was just more partisan folly, the truth is even more disturbing.
By even suggesting that objecting to violating a longstanding rule is partisan, we are allowing the press to enable Republicans to continue pretending there is no reality.
In reality, no matter which side of the aisle you are on, it’s a rule not to comment on ongoing investigations that could impact an election. The reasons for this are obvious and the potential ramifications for abuse are terrifying for both parties — for instance, it’s obvious that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign for coordination with Russia, but we don’t headline that because the FBI hasn’t commented on that, because…
To do so would violate the rule not to interfere with elections.
So it’s really quite frightening to hear people claim objecting to violating this rule is partisan, even as the Trump campaign is benefiting from the adherence to said rule. If the rule applies to Donald Trump, it should apply to Hillary Clinton.
Asking that this value be applied to both sides is not partisan.
We must stick to reality. We must not allow our need to appear objective cause us to fall so far down the rabbit hole that we enable Republicans to keep drinking the no-fact Kool-Aid.
The press did the Republican smoke is a real fire thing all through President Obama’s terms, at one point claiming he was implicated in Benghazi emails because a reporter allowed a Republican aide to read him said emails — and of course, it turned out that the emails didn’t say what the aide told the reporter. But that was learned much later and as everyone knows, a lie travels faster than the truth.
And now American voters in swing states who read papers will think the FBI is investigating Clinton.
So Comey’s letter did damage Hillary Clinton. Even if she wins the election, the letter damaged her and down ballot Democrats.
The media never learns. They take Republican smoke and innuendo and treat it as fact, every time. They look like fools to those who know there was no there in the Comey letter, but the average voter doesn’t live for political updates.
The irresponsible damage is done.
The Media Got Suckered Into Buying The GOP’s Bogus Clinton FBI Email Tale added by Sarah Jones on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016 | 0 |
When Shahram Amiri emerged from the shadows into the spotlight six years ago, he was a young Iranian scientist who suddenly appeared on YouTube from a safe house, telling a bizarre story of having been kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency. Then, in another video that quickly followed, his story changed: He had come to the United States voluntarily to study, but desperately missed his son back in Tehran. Soon, father and son were reunited in Iran, in a joyous scene broadcast by the Iranian government. Then Mr. Amiri disappeared, amid rumors that he had been imprisoned. Questions, of course, went unanswered: Was he a spy, recruited by the United States for his insider knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program? Or a double agent, sent by Tehran to spread disinformation, or to learn what the Americans knew? On Sunday the case took what appears to be its final turn. “Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the enemy,” Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, a spokesman for Iran’s Justice Ministry, told reporters in Tehran, according to international news services and the country’s state news agency. Those stories confirmed initial reports from Saturday that quoted his mother saying she had seen his body. The American, Israeli and European search to understand the scope of Iran’s nuclear program — an intelligence effort that continues to this day — has taken many bizarre turns that have already become the stuff of books and film. And the drama of Mr. Amiri’s apparent double defection came in a summer of espionage efforts against Iran gone wrong. The Stuxnet computer virus was then replicating itself around the world, which ultimately revealed the sophisticated cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that many today see as a turning point in the use of digital attacks. But few stories were as confusing, and at moments as Mr. Amiri’s. Among the side players was Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, who said as Mr. Amiri was returning to Iran: “He’s free to go. He was free to come. Those decisions are his alone to make. ” Some of her emails, made public last year during the controversy over her private email server, show that her top foreign policy aide warned her that the story was about to break, but they give little insight into what happened behind the scenes. Weeks after Mr. Amiri returned to Iran, American intelligence officials described the events on conditions of anonymity to a small group of reporters. Their story was that Mr. Amiri had been a voluntary recruit, interviewed and then placed in the agency’s equivalent of a witness protection program. When he first told his C. I. A. handlers that he planned to return, they warned him, according to the intelligence agency’s account, that it would probably end with his head in a noose. Mr. Amiri was 32 years old in 2009 when he left a university post to go on what he declared was a pilgrimage to Mecca. He disappeared when he got to Medina, in Saudi Arabia. He had left his shaving kit in an empty hotel room, and the Iranians guessed that he was with the Americans — and they accused the United States of kidnapping. He was an unlikely spy, a bit bumbling and nervous. By all accounts, Mr. Amiri was not in the inner circle around Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist who had run the weapons side of the Iranian nuclear program. But Mr. Amiri had seen a lot he worked at the academic center of research for the Iranian program. It now appears he may have begun work as an American source while he was still in Iran. As a specialist in measuring nuclear radiation, he had been to a number of sensitive Iranian sites, all of great interest to intelligence officials. According to officials familiar with his debriefing, he was among the sources who told the Americans about the internal Iranian debate over whether the country needed a nuclear weapon or just a “threshold capability” to build one on short notice without violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and inviting a military backlash. By 2009, the C. I. A. had apparently decided that the chances he would be detected were rising, and offered to get him out of the country. The agency promised him $5 million and a new identity. Mr. Amiri believed his estranged wife would never leave Iran, and he decided to go alone, without his son. After he was interviewed in Washington, he ended up near Tucson, under the agency’s national resettlement program, which provides cover and protection for cooperative foreign spies. But he immediately missed his young son, and began calling home. Iranian intelligence agencies pressured his family, and by one account threatened to harm his son. They told Mr. Amiri to make a videotape claiming he had been kidnapped. He did, using a webcam to declare that he had been kidnapped in Medina “in a joint operation by the terror and abduction units” of the C. I. A. and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service. ” He said he had been drugged and tortured. Two months later, in 2010, the video showed up on Iranian state television. The C. I. A. made its own video with Mr. Amiri, filmed in the friendly setting of a study. In that one, Mr. Amiri contradicted what he had said in the first. “I am free here,” he said, “and I assure everyone that I am quite safe. ” His estranged wife told Iranian television that the second video must have been faked. “He was reading text,” she said. A few weeks later the Iranians broadcast a third video, in which Mr. Amiri returned to the story that he had been kidnapped, but had escaped his captors. Behind the scenes, Mr. Amiri was telling his handlers that he had made a mistake by defecting, and only wanted to return to see his son. He was warned of what had happened to Soviet defectors — prison and potentially execution — who had returned. The C. I. A. ’s resettlement program has clear rules that if a defector wants to return home, there is no legal basis for the United States to force him to stay. So in July 2010, Mr. Amiri ended up in a taxi to a side office of the Pakistani Embassy in Northwest Washington, near the vice president’s residence. (In the absence of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States, Pakistan represents Iran’s interests.) He landed in Tehran on July 15, 2010, and his young son was there to embrace him. The heartwarming picture was broadcast throughout the country. Mr. Amiri told Iranian journalists that he had been offered millions of dollars to stay in the United States and reveal all he knew about the nuclear program, but had not done so. He told interviewers that he had never been in the two most sensitive Iranian nuclear sites, at Natanz and Fordo. Weeks later, he disappeared. His mother said on the BBC Persian service over the weekend that he had initially been sentenced to 10 years in prison, though Iranian officials had never announced that. Last month, she said, that punishment was changed to a death sentence. She said he had tried to console her, saying he would finally be free and at peace. | 1 |
BRUSSELS — With Britain’s prime minister omitted for the first time, European Union leaders at a summit meeting wrestled on Wednesday with an existential question: how to salvage a venture that has provided peace and relative prosperity to 500 million people but has lost public support. “We all need to wake up and smell the coffee,” President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania said at the start of private talks in Brussels on how to relaunch the European Union after the shock of Britain’s vote last week to leave. In the absence of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, who was already back in London after attending an initial day of talks, the group’s remaining 27 leaders all agreed that the European Union needs to change the way it works if it is to curb a rising tide of populism driven in large part by hostility toward Brussels. Presenting the leaders with his own analysis of why 52 percent of Britons had voted to withdraw from the European Union, Mr. Cameron, at a somber dinner late Tuesday, said the main reason was immigration. Polls in other countries show deep opposition to an influx of foreigners. But reducing immigration, or at least the right of European Union citizens to move wherever they want in the bloc, is currently impossible, because the free movement of citizens is an inviolable principle of the whole European project. At the same time, slowing the flow of migrants from outside Europe is something that officials in Brussels consider a notable success. It took a long time and many meetings, but, under a controversial deal with Turkey, last year’s flood of nearly a million people into Europe through Greek islands has slowed to a trickle. Migrants are still arriving in Europe after hazardous journeys across the Mediterranean from North Africa, but they are far fewer than the number who arrived last year through Greece — the people used by campaigners in Britain to rally opposition to the European Union. With no easy fixes to Europe’s public image and no consensus on what a reformed union might look like, the main agreement reached on Wednesday was familiar: to hold another meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia, in September. In a final statement, the leaders acknowledged that the British referendum “creates a new situation for the European Union,” and that “many people express dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. ” Europeans, they added, “expect us to do better when it comes to providing security, jobs and growth, as well as hope for a better future. ” Changing a complicated system that has three presidents, two seats of Parliament in cities hundreds of miles apart and, at least until Britain formally departs, 28 member countries, was never going to be decided in a few hours. “The response to this new challenge for Europe will take time to find,” Frans Timmermans, a former foreign minister of the Netherlands and the first vice president of the union’s executive arm, the European Commission, cautioned earlier this week. “We must be brutally honest with ourselves as we debate the path forward. Today, there are more questions than answers. ” François Lafond, a professor of European integration at Sciences Po, the Paris university, said the task of finding answers was so big that it should be entrusted to a special convention of experts and officials who would be given at least six months to create a new approach. Otherwise, “the populists will continue to grow,” he said. “We have to give a clear signal of change. ” A critical issue, Mr. Lafond said, is which functions should be returned to individual nations and which should fall within the powers of the union. Arguments over this division of labor have dogged the European project since it began more than six decades ago in response to World War II, and have caused numerous crises. One of the most serious came in 1965, when President Charles de Gaulle of France objected to proposals from Brussels that he saw as weakening national sovereignty and pushing Europe toward becoming a giant state. Infuriated by what he viewed as an intolerable infringement, he pulled French officials from the Brussels institutions of what was then the European Economic Community. Their departure, a narrow, bureaucratic version of Britain’s, became known as the empty chair crisis. It was resolved, as most European crises have been, through haggling and an elaborate compromise ensuring that France would retain its national prerogatives on major issues. The crisis unleashed by the British vote, however, offers no bureaucratic fix, as it involves what have long been the European project’s most vulnerable points: its remoteness from ordinary people and lack of democratic legitimacy. The European Parliament, elected by popular vote since 1979, was meant to fill this gap. But given no power to actually introduce legislation, it is mostly seen as a noisy, expensive forum that merely approves measures proposed by the Commission. Perhaps the most significant role played by the European Parliament has been to provide a megaphone for some of the union’s most impassioned enemies, notably politicians from the U. K. Independence Party, or UKIP. The party — whose leader, Nigel Farage, and 23 followers hold seats in the assembly — campaigned fervently for Britain’s exit from the European Union. They and allies like Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, call the European Union a meddling and alien force, a message that has resounded elsewhere, particularly France. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front party, wants the nation to hold its own referendum. France’s deeply unpopular Socialist president, François Hollande, who is struggling to rescue his own political future as well as Europe’s, said on Wednesday that drastic change was needed. “Keeping the status quo would be the worst,” he said, “because populists would continue to challenge Europe. ” But many of the things Mr. Hollande and European politicians want to see, such as more pooling of resources from shared European funds — are anathema to Germany, the dominant power on the Continent, which wants to enforce fiscal prudence but resists moving toward a federal state. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany shut the door on any overhaul involving the revision of European treaties, a laborious process that requires referendums and has often stoked sentiment. Ms. Merkel said Europe needed to recover its élan and inspire ordinary citizens with an ambitious vision, as the United States did with its space program. “When Russia, many years ago, sent the first people into space, America said, ‘Now we have to send someone to the moon,’” Ms. Merkel said, citing an observation she said a fellow leader had made in private discussions. “So we have to set a positive agenda, positive goals, and try to show we have an ambition, an aspiration to produce prosperity for our people. ” | 1 |
A leading New York City Democrat is calling on fellow progressives to recognize Sharia law advocate and CUNY commencement speaker Linda Sarsour as a bigot. [“I want to emphasize that Linda’s statements on social media and at rallies are Linda’s — she owns them,” Rory Lancman — a member of the New York City Council from Queens — told the Algemeiner. “They have a history of antisemitism, of — if you can believe that is something someone would still traffic in, in 2017 — and of hostility and threats towards people who disagree with her. ” Lancman told the Algemeiner that it was “inappropriate” for CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health to host Sarsour, a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activist (BDS) given her statements against Jews and other women. In the past, Sarsour has tweeted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism” and said that writers Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserve an “a$$ whipping” and that she wishes she could have their “vaginas taken away” for their opposition to Sharia law, which she supports: Twitter is forever: Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour wants to grab Ayaan Hirsi Ali by the p*ssy. pic. twitter. — SHIREEN QUDOSI (@ShireenQudosi) January 26, 2017, Yet Sarsour has many progressive supporters who reportedly insist she is the victim of advocates. Despite her rhetoric, the TAlgemeiner reported that, at a small rally organized by progressive groups in Lower Manhattan on Monday, speakers rejected the allegation that Sarsour is an antisemite. In an for the Daily News, leftist Rabbis Barat Ellman and Ellen Lippmann argued, “Linda Sarsour is a friend to Jews. ” They wrote, “Yes, Sarsour is an ardent critic of Zionism — which should come as no surprise for a with relatives in Palestine. But she has been clear that it is Zionism — Zionism that dismisses Palestinian claims to a national identity or for statehood — that she vehemently opposes. ” Zionism is the belief that Israel is the established and rightful homeland of the Jews. The rabbi duo then goes on to suggest, “Sarsour’s retort — that Ali and others she disagrees with ‘don’t deserve to be women,’ so she wishes she could ‘take their vaginas away’ — was written in anger, and we agree it wasn’t nice,” adding, “But it was not meant to be taken literally, and is hardly proof that she wants to assault Muslims who disagree with her or surgically strike women’s bodies. ” In conclusion, Ellman and Lippmann said, “CUNY wants to honor a leader at commencement. We say amen. ” Lancman told the Algemeiner, “That whole was an absurd whitewash, and that sentence in particular. It was embarrassing for anyone who purports to be involved with women’s rights. ” Democrat New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind ( ) has also been critical of Sarsour. He created a video asking her to answer questions about her troubling statements and associations. In addition to the noted statements, he asked Sarsour, “You think this is a courageous act to pick up rocks and throw them at cars?” in response to Sarsour’s tweet: The definition of courage. #Palestine pic. twitter. — Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) October 12, 2015, Hikind noted that those rocks have seriously injured people and killed people in cars. In 2013, a girl died after the car she was in was attacked by rocks. Adele Biton was in a coma for two years before succumbing to her injuries and developing pneumonia. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
Hampton Creek, a prominent that is trying to bring tech industry panache to the world of mayonnaise, ranch dressing and other food products, has come under scrutiny by regulators for its business practices. The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into Hampton Creek, according to a person briefed on the situation who asked not to be named because it had not been announced publicly. The S. E. C. inquiry is a response to a recent report from Bloomberg News that described an organized effort by Hampton Creek to buy large quantities of its Just Mayo product — a mayonnaise that uses a ingredient instead of eggs — by sending undercover contractors into stores. Kevin J. Callahan, a spokesman for the S. E. C. declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported the S. E. C. inquiry. Hampton Creek’s chief executive, Joshua Tetrick, said he had heard from the S. E. C. about the informal inquiry but declined to give further details. Bloomberg’s report said the product buyback effort, which took place in 2014, made Just Mayo seem more popular than it was, not long before Hampton Creek raised $90 million from venture capitalists and other private investors. The basic details of the program were confirmed by a former Hampton Creek employee, who asked for anonymity because of confidentiality restrictions with his onetime employer. After the report, Mr. Tetrick wrote in a blog post that the mayonnaise shopping spree was part of a quality control program that had minimal impact on overall sales. The inquiry puts a cloud over Hampton Creek, which has described itself as the food company in the world. It has promised to tackle the food industry with the gusto of a technology using some of the same big data tools to do so. One of its goals is to identify healthy, ingredients that can substitute for common foods like eggs, with less of a negative impact on the environment. Hampton Creek, based in San Francisco, has been praised by the likes of Bill Gates received financial backing from prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors like Marc Benioff and Vinod Khosla and succeeded in getting its products widely distributed at Walmart, Costco, Whole Foods and other retailers. The inquiry may be only the start of tougher questions facing Hampton Creek. The company is believed to be losing significant amounts of money. It is raising up to $220 million from investors, according to a Delaware filing provided by Equidate, which tracks private company shares. It’s not uncommon, of course, for to bleed red ink in their early days. But Hampton Creek, founded in 2011, faces some basic challenges with the manufacturing costs for its products. According to one former employee, in 2014 the company had negative gross margins of about 20 percent on Just Mayo, meaning that the raw cost to the company for every $1 it got in sales was about $1. 20. The issue arises from Hampton Creek’s use of premium ingredients in its products without charging shoppers the often prices attached to such food products. The vegetable oil used in Just Mayo, for example, does not come from genetically modified organism sources, which adds significant cost, according to the former employee. But on Walmart. com on Friday, a jar of Just Mayo was selling for $3. 66 — 32 cents less than a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise of the same size. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Tetrick said the company planned to break even by the end of next year. “We are fortunate to be well capitalized,” he said, declining to disclose how much the company had in the bank. He added that some of Hampton Creek’s dressings, mayonnaise and food service cookie products were meaning they generated more revenue than they cost to make. “We’re not trying to optimize at every turn, thinking, ‘What’s the margin? ’” he said. “It’s about solving the bigger food problem. You know what we do about it? We attack it. ” The company’s program to buy its own mayonnaise has raised eyebrows among retail analysts. Food makers typically do quality checks through every step of production until the product lands on grocery shelves. Kurt Jetta, chief executive of TABS Analytics, a research firm, said that while he had heard of companies buying their own products off retail shelves, in most of those cases, “it’s to jack up the sales numbers, not for quality assurance. ” He also said paying retail prices to buy products for quality assurance made “zero financial sense. ” When food companies want to move a product off a grocery shelf to replace it with a reformulated or newly packaged version or because it has passed its expiration date, they issue a credit to the store manager — and then only to cover the price the retailer paid, not the consumer price. Some food industry consultants, though, said it was not for companies to buy their food products off shelves. Stericycle is a company that helps manufacturers with “audits” of their products for quality assurance purposes. “Manufacturers and retailers may need help with resolution, including handling consumer complaints, product quality evaluation and much more, but they may not have the internal staff to handle those things quickly and efficiently,” said Kevin Pollack, vice president and general manager at Stericycle. Word of the program was mentioned briefly in a lawsuit against Hampton Creek filed this year on behalf of two former contractors for the company who were seeking unpaid wages. The contractors worked in stores in 2014 and 2015, representing Hampton Creek and handing out samples of Just Mayo to spread word of the product. But according to the lawsuit, Hampton Creek required the contractors to also “buy out shelves of Defendant’s products. ” | 1 |
ROME — Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism. But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, thinker, Julius Evola. “The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark. Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions. Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather. They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works. More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump. “Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and elements. In the days after the election, Mr. Spencer led a Washington conference in chants of “Hail Trump!” But he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun. Mr. Spencer said “it means a tremendous amount” that Mr. Bannon was aware of Evola and other Traditionalist thinkers. “Even if he hasn’t fully imbibed them and been changed by them, he is at least open to them,” he said. “He at least recognizes that they are there. That is a stark difference to the American conservative movement that either was ignorant of them or attempted to suppress them. ” Mr. Bannon, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is an avid and reader. He has spoken enthusiastically about everything from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which sees history in cycles of cataclysmic and change. His awareness of and reference to Evola in itself only reflects that reading. But some on the consider Mr. Bannon a door through which Evola’s ideas of a hierarchical society run by a spiritually superior caste can enter in a period of crisis. “Evolists view his ship as coming in,” said Prof. Richard Drake at the University of Montana, who wrote about Evola in his book “The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy. ” For some of them, it has been a long time coming. “It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment. “If Bannon has these ideas, we have to see how he influences the politics of Trump,” he said. A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the ” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found. The article was by Milo Yiannopoulos, the provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses. Mr. Trump recently defended Mr. Yiannopoulos as a symbol of free speech after demonstrators violently protested his planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley. The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion. ” “It’s hard to imagine them reading Evola,” the article continued. “They may be inclined to sympathize to those causes, but mainly because it annoys the right people. ” Evola, who has more than annoyed people for nearly a century, seems to be having a moment. “When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming. ” Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye. A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions. Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants. ” Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values. It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth. Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up. ” Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual. ” That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini. The dictator already admired Evola’s early writings on race, which influenced the 1938 Racial Laws restricting the rights of Jews in Italy. Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year. Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his . Mr. Bannon suggested in his Vatican remarks that the Fascist movement had come out of Evola’s ideas. As Mr. Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, he mentioned “Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian Fascism. ” The reality, historians say, is that Evola sought to “infiltrate and influence” the Fascists, as Mr. Sedgwick put it, as a powerful vehicle to spread his ideas. In his Vatican talk, Mr. Bannon suggested that although Mr. Putin represented a “kleptocracy,” the Russian president understood the existential danger posed by “a potential new caliphate” and the importance of using nationalism to stand up for traditional institutions. “We, the West,” Mr. Bannon added, “really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism. ” As Mr. Bannon suggested in his speech, Mr. Putin’s most influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian Traditionalist and writer sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin. ” An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called for a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism” and advocated a theory of “Eurasianism” — which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin’s expansionism and meddling in Western European politics. Mr. Dugin sees European Traditionalists as needing Russia, and Mr. Putin, to defend them from the onslaught of Western liberal democracy, individual liberty, and materialism — all Evolian bêtes noires. This appeal of traditional values on populist voters and against elites, the “ Union” and “centralized government in the United States,” as Mr. Bannon put it, was not lost on Mr. Trump’s ideological guru. “A lot of people that are Traditionalists,” he said in his Vatican remarks, “are attracted to that. ” | 1 |
BNI Store Nov 4 2016 Wife of Muslim jihadist who killed and wounded over 100 in Orlando nightclub massacre says she “knew nothing” “I was unaware of everything,” says Omar Mateen’s wife, 30-year-old Noor Salman (whose whereabouts were a matter of controversy for some time after the massacre), has given her first interview since the Pulse Nightclub massacre to the New York Times. The New York Times piece does not go into detail about her movements since the FBI seemingly lost track of her, although it suggests she is still a person of interest to law enforcement. Her lawyers pop up early in the article to insist she “did nothing wrong” and to forbid questions about her discussions with federal agents. Salman said she had no idea what Mateen was up to on the day of the attack. She knew her husband watched jihadist videos, but she did not think much of it. But how could she have not suspected what her husband was planning – she knew he had the weapons, she drove him to the nightclub and dropped him off: Noor Salman, wife of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, had all the hallmarks of a willing accomplice to her husband’s jihadist slaughter. Georgia State University professor Mia Bloom told The Times that studies show relatives and friends are aware of budding terrorist activities about 64% of the time and argued that Mateen’s abusive relationship with Salman “doesn’t give her a free pass as a bystander to not come forward.” Salman insists she had no dark suspicions about several trips she took with Mateen that have been viewed as preparation for his terrorist career, although the lawyers notably intervened to prevent her from discussing the most notorious of these incidents – the April 2015 trip to Disneyworld that Mateen may have used to case the park for an attack. Salman did nothing to warn the police of her husband’s intentions. When the FBI first questioned Salman, she admitted to bringing Mateen ammunition and a holster. The piece describes her as “shattered and afraid,” to the point that she sometimes has trouble getting out of bed. (Awww…I bet those 49 people her husband slaughtered in cold blood in Orlando would love to have that problem) | 0 |
HOLBROOK, Ariz. — The teenage boys amble off the school bus like so many old souls, knees and backs stiff, eyes puffy and hollowed. The previous evening this Navajo basketball troop from Chinle High School had played a rollicking game against the Monument Valley Mustangs, on the northern edge of the Navajo Nation. The boys from Chinle went on a late run and won the game. Their trip back home took three hours, their school bus rolling through moonlit mountain passes and mesas, and plains. The boys fell into bed well past midnight. Then they woke up and boarded the bus again, this time riding two hours south for a Saturday afternoon game here in Holbrook, a high prairie crossroads. These Navajo teenagers are practitioners of “rez ball,” a style of hoops. They deeply desire a state championship. They also are perched on that precarious cliff wall between adolescence and manhood, and that brings other questions and yearnings. The seniors study college catalogs and wonder if they should leave their starkly beautiful land of family and clans, a reservation that is bigger than West Virginia. Hope and fear jostle. Nachae Nez, a shooting guard, a senior and a fine student, sits in the bleachers and talks of a future that feels as alive as a snake in his hands. He lives in a small town tucked against the red sandstone flanks of the Chuska Mountains. He dreams of attending a college. “They say it’s hard for natives to leave the rez,” he says. “Your favorite place if you’re a Navajo, it’s your grandmother’s hogan,” he adds, using the Navajo word for a house built in a traditional and sacred style. He pauses. “I know I need to leave if I want to be of service to my people. ” He peers at me. “These choices are painful, right?” Cooper Burbank is the youngest Chinle player, a preternaturally calm and talented freshman who deals with his own dislocation. He grew up in the red mesa northlands and attended a middle school of 108 students. His parents — his mom is a teacher and his father a custodian — wanted him to attend a bigger school, with more course offerings, to prepare for college. So they took a hard swallow and left grandmother and cousins and clans behind and moved to Chinle, where the high school has more than 1, 000 students and the family, Cooper and parents, are outsiders. Many weekends, the Burbanks travel back to their village. “I like to go home and clear my head,” Cooper says. He adds, softly: “My life needs challenges. I know that. ” Several months ago Raul Mendoza, 69, the widely admired coach of the Wildcats, invited me to watch him try to revive the Chinle team. Last season, before he took over, the Wildcats finished this year, the Wildcats will finish . My wife, Evelyn, and I lived in a trailer on the Navajo Nation years ago. She was a midwife and delivered babies. We wandered this land with our young sons, and Navajo sank its hook deep into us. The chance to return and explore the passions that drive this coach and his Navajo teenagers proved irresistible. After my trip in December, I wrote of Mendoza’s story. Half Mexican and half Tohono O’odham, a child who picked cotton in the fields of Arizona, he is a lifelong wanderer. I’ve returned to explore the lives of his teenage players. Chinle sits 5, 500 feet above sea level, west of Canyon de Chelly, where in the 1860s the Navajo held out against Kit Carson and federal troops who had come to destroy their crops and burn their homes. Basketball is a passion here. Chinle has 4, 500 residents, and its high school arena, the Wildcat Den, seats 7, 000. Fans drive and hitchhike 50, 60, 80 miles to games. Coaches are regularly tossed aside after a single losing season. Most of the teenage players observe traditional beliefs: They bow to the four sacred mountain peaks of Navajo they carry corn pollen in case their path crosses that of the coyote, a notorious trickster they swallow a bitter herb before games to guard against envy, jealousy and witchcraft. One senior wears his unshorn hair in a woven pony tail. He will cut it at age 18 and present the locks to his grandfather. As they wander canyons, they listen for the voices of ancestors. Before each game, a girl sings the national anthem in Navajo. Harsh winds blow through as well. Some parents are racked by hunger for booze and disappear others lose jobs and are evicted. The median annual income in Chinle is $27, 000. In surrounding villages, it is half that. Marcus Litson, a senior forward with a shaggy mane and easy smile, grew up in the same town as Nachae, who is the team captain. They roamed forests and climbed sandstone buttes. In his telling, his boyhood sounds like an idyll. He also lived four years on the distant New Mexico side of the reservation. Why? “My mom and dad split, and Mom won me in seventh grade,” he says. “When I got to 16, the court made me choose who to live with. ” Marcus missed his cousins and clans, and he chose to go back to Tsaile with his father. What did his mom say? “I haven’t heard from her in a year,” he says. He turns away and whispers, “I think she took it hard. ” Darrian Yeahquo, a junior, wanders by. His father disappeared when he was a toddler, and his mother moved the family to Albuquerque. He found city high schools tough and scary. Last spring, his grandfather, a Vietnam veteran crippled by broken knees and lingering war shock, could no longer care for his ranch and asked for help. Darrian hopped the bus to Navajo. All summer long he and a favorite cousin rode horses and tended sheep and cattle. His grandmother made sandwiches for her teenage herders and tied their lunch to a gnarled pine tree. Darrian himself in a dream. “If I have to leave the rez to go to college, to learn irrigation to help my family and people, I will,” he says. “This time I know I am coming back. ” Nachae and Cooper remain the team pillars. Nachae feels the urgency to win that comes with a senior’s sense of time fleeting Cooper is the team’s future. After practice, they remain in the darkened arena: Cooper shoots at one end of the court Nachae shoots at the other. Mendoza walks me out of the gym. “Natives, we’re not expected to be successful, and sometimes I worry that my kids feel that way,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with not achieving your goal, but you have to fight. ” He nods at Nachae and Cooper. “Those boys are intelligent and fight hard. ” The Wildcats remain a team half formed and maddeningly inconsistent. Sometimes forwards toss up errant and point guards tumble toward the hoop with no discernible plan. Mendoza enjoys a tortured relationship with rez ball. He appreciates that generations of natives grew up on this style of play. At its best, it is artful and breathtaking. He prefers when his players settle into defensive crouches, or when they pass and pass until they find an open man. “Are we going to play rez ball or are we going to play this game the right way?” he told his teenagers. “It bothers me when you can’t see the open man. ” Before I arrived, the Wildcats scored an upset of Ganado, which had been the only undefeated team on the reservation. Then they ran Monument Valley’s team off the court. They swell with confidence in Holbrook. This gym, however, is freighted with history. Mendoza once was Holbrook’s coach. He won a championship here, and Arizona coach of the year honors, and his departure still upsets some fans. Nachae played here as a freshman, and he has former teammates and friends here, and that brings pressure, too. The Wildcats begin strongly. Nachae hits a jumper and tosses down a and drives to the basket. Cooper wrestles rebounds and hits that soft dagger of a jumper. Just as suddenly, the tempo shifts: The Wildcats throw up jumpers. Nachae misses layups and grows frustrated. The Wildcat players stop swinging the ball to Cooper, who remains reluctant to impose his will. The game gallops away, and the Wildcats lose, . Mendoza does not hide his displeasure. You came in here laughing, he tells his team. Your play was embarrassing. Nachae pulls his jersey up over his face. Failure pierces deeply he wants to lead. He raises his hand and says, “We’re a really good team, but we have trouble connecting with each other. ” Cooper listens, his face opaque. On Sunday morning, a photographer and I drive north to Rock Point. We join Cooper and his family at a God’s Grace Fellowship church on a rutted dirt road two miles north of the general store. The congregation numbers a few dozen, the men wearing cowboy boots and hats, jeans and dress shirts, the women in dresses and Navajo turquoise jewelry. The Bible is written in Navajo. In a kind nod to their visitors, the female pastors translate the service into English. At the end, Cooper walks up to a pastor and holds his palms out. She grasps his hands, and they pray together for the strength to face down his challenges. Afterward, we drive with the Burbank family to a tiny restaurant, the only joint for many miles. Cooper’s mother, Joni, explains that she and her husband became fast friends in elementary school they began dating in high school. Both of their fathers died because of drunken driving. “I came from a home he was raised by his grandmother,” Joni says. “We were magnets attracting. ” Joni attended high school and college in Flagstaff. Her husband, Darrick, worked construction and rode rodeo bulls. One night they drove to San Francisco just to smell the salt air. They married, and when Cooper, the first of their four children, arrived they agreed: no drinking, an intact family. Darrick gave up good construction dollars in the boom towns of Las Vegas and Phoenix to work maintenance at the local school. “I had a hard time with that at first,” he says. “But I didn’t have a dad. My job is to give these kids a dad. ” Joni taught at the elementary school twice she had Cooper as her student. They joined a church and stayed close to cousins and elders. They are building a hogan atop a mesa with a Navajo name that they say is too long to translate into English. Change beckoned as Cooper reached eighth grade. Within the context of a reservation of 175, 000 Navajo, Chinle is a bustling town. The Burbanks now live in an apartment there. “Cooper needed the challenge I needed professional growth,” Joni says. “I prayed and did a lot of searching. Then I said to myself: ‘Joni, Cooper, it’s time to push yourselves. ’” They bade goodbye to Joni’s mother, Virginia Tsosie, whose trailer sits 25 yards from their own in Rock Point, near the smooth folds of cliffs. Tsosie misses them greatly. When Cooper arrives back each weekend he walks into Grandma’s trailer and flops on her couch, and she massages his legs and tells him stories. Talk of distant schools stirs trepidation in those of Tsosie’s generation. When she was very young, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent her to an boarding school. She went many months without seeing her parents. Tribal culture was treated as backward, a skin to be shed in pursuit of assimilation. When Tsosie spoke Navajo to a friend, a teacher washed out her mouth with soap. “I gagged,” she recalls. “Now I talk to my grandchildren in Navajo all the time. They know the survival words. ” The winter sun sinks toward the buttes. Cooper excuses himself, grabs a basketball and walks outside, followed by his younger brothers. He dribbles on the red dirt and shoots at a backboard with a hoop twisted like broken foot. Swish, and swish, and swish. We say goodbyes and drive south to the high country village of Tsaile, which in Navajo means water flowing into a canyon. Nachae, the team captain, meets us by the gas station. We clamber into his pickup truck and bounce up an icy and rutted track to his family’s trailer. He hops out and points to the trailers next door. That one is my grandma. And that one, too. And that one, that’s my auntie. His mom, Andrea Nez, comes to the door and smiles. “No secrets around here,” she says. Nachae attended three high schools in four years. After his freshman year in Holbrook, he spun to the hoop and tore up his knee. He had surgery and needed six months before he could walk unaided. That, he figured, was that for hoops. He enrolled in Navajo Prep, a private school in Farmington, N. M. where academics are king. “I figured books were my way out,” he says. A physical therapist helped him rebuild his knee. He played as a junior and led Prep in scoring. Then a flour plant laid off his mother, and the money dried up. He left Navajo Prep and returned to Tsaile, where he enrolled at Chinle for his senior year. Nachae’s Navajo name is Napi. He tells me it means Old Man in Navajo and in Blackfoot, which is his mother’s tribe. That means you are wise, I reply. He smiles, wistful, and points to the knee he ices after every game and his sore shoulder. “Maybe it just means I have an old body. ” Like so many Navajo, he occupies several worlds. As a child he danced powwow, shot bow and arrow and dreamed of following his father, Felix, who rode serious rodeo bulls. He sees a world alive with spirits. He also has fine grades, serves on the student council and has an auntie who graduated from Cornell as a guide star. He is aware of the world outside the reservation. He has eyes on New Mexico State and its agriculture program. Last summer, he traveled the Navajo Nation reservation helping with a wool buyback program, aimed at reinvigorating the sheep industry. “I want to get educated to help my people,” he says. He drops us by our car. Tsaile sits at 7, 100 feet, adrift in snow. The night sky is kaleidoscopic with stars. The next night the Wildcats drop a fierce game to Page. They are limping into the playoffs. As suddenly, the Wildcats kick into gear. Their playoff opener is against Holbrook, and their defense goes taut. Chinle wins by a basket. Next up is Blue Ridge High School, a powerhouse with a record of . The Wildcats should be an afterthought. Nachae, in his final high school game, has perhaps his finest performance. He scores 28 points, a whirlwind. Cooper scores 12 and plays fierce defense. The Wildcats lose only in the final minute, . Mendoza is taciturn compliments fall sparing as bread crumbs from his mouth. “I told the kids that we were just a few possessions from advancing,” he says. “They finally learned to compete and battle. I’m very proud of our efforts. ” Now Nachae pivots. He must spend his days deciphering college dreams. Cooper must prepare himself for a new leadership role next year. As for me, I drive out of Navajo, past buttes and cliffs under a frozen dawn sky scraped clean of clouds. The sensation is of doors opening. | 1 |
Tin pot rule and corruption in the United States — it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah: there is not one honest man in the party of treason and treachery.
Podesta brags DOJ’s Huma “investigation” spokesman Peter Kadzik “kept me out of jail” see WikiLeaks here.
“John Podesta’s Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ’s Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails,” Zero Hedge , October 31, 2016:
Now that the FBI has obtained the needed warrant to start poring over the 650,000 or so emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner’s notebook, among which thousands of emails sent from Huma Abedin using Hillary Clinton’s personal server, moments ago the Us Justice Department decided to also finally join the probe, and as AP reported moments ago, it vowed to dedicate all needed resources to quickly review the over half a million emails in the Clinton case.
https://twitter.com/AP/status/793184986832769025
In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter J. Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers. #BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review. #8days pic.twitter.com/PCgT2ODkQd
— Just the Facts (@JTF_News) October 31, 2016
So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.
And yet, something felt odd about this.
Kadzik… Kadzik… where have we heard that name?
Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, “ Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary’s Benghazi Hearing ” in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony?
It was Peter Kadzik.
In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.
For those who missed it, this is what we reported:
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.
The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant. The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.
Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. Another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.
As the Daily Caller noted , the dinner arrangement “is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.” As one former U.S. Attorney tells told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.
The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.
“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.
Kadzik’s role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable Kadzik, as helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.
It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta’s, and thus the Clinton Foundation’s inside man, it is Peter Kadzik.
Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email , which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”
Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky . In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.
Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.
Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation . But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.
Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.
Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”
The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon . She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.
Kadzik’s current role
In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.
But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.
In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”
DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”
It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.
Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.
Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.
* * *
And now it seems that Kadzik will be in charge of the DOJ’s “probe” into Huma Abedin’s emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find “anything” of note.
Article posted with permission from Pamela Geller Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares | 0 |
CLEVELAND — Donald John Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday night with an unusually vehement appeal to Americans who feel that their country is spiraling out of control and yearn for a leader who will take aggressive, even extreme, actions to protect them. Mr. Trump, 70, a New York real estate developer and reality television star who leveraged his fame and forceful persona to become the rare political outsider to lead the ticket of a major party, drew exuberant cheers from Republican convention delegates as he strode onto the stage of the Quicken Loans Arena and delivered a speech as fiery as his candidacy. With dark imagery and an almost angry tone, Mr. Trump portrayed the United States as a diminished and even humiliated nation, and offered himself as an savior who could resurrect the country’s standing in the eyes of both enemies and Americans. “Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” an Mr. Trump said, standing against a backdrop of American flags. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. ” Mr. Trump nearly shouted the names of states where police officers had been killed recently, as the crowd erupted in applause, and returned repeatedly to the major theme of the speech: “Law and order,” he said four times, each time drawing out the syllables. Evoking the tumult of the 1960s and the uncertainty that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Trump made a sharp departure from the optimistic talk about American possibility that has characterized Republican presidential candidates since Ronald Reagan redefined the party over 30 years ago. In promoting his views on crime, immigration and hostile nations, Mr. Trump was wagering that voters would embrace his style of populism and his promises of safety if they feel even less secure by Election Day. But his speech — the longest, at an hour and 15 minutes, since at least 1972 — had relatively little new to offer women, Hispanics, blacks and others who have been turned off by Mr. Trump’s incendiary brand of politics. He did sound like a different sort of Republican at times, though, making no mention of abortion — a core issue for many Republicans — and saying of his support among evangelical voters, “I’m not sure I totally deserve it. ” Mr. Trump also challenged Republican orthodoxy as he promised to end multilateral trade deals and limit American intervention in global crises. He denounced “15 years of wars in the Middle East” — a rebuke of his party’s last president, George W. Bush — and pledged to help union members, coal miners and other Americans who have historically supported Democrats. “These are the forgotten men and women of our country,” said Mr. Trump, a billionaire with a mixed record of job creation and layoffs. “People who work hard but no longer have a voice — I am your voice. ” He even vowed “to do everything in my power to protect our L. G. B. T. Q. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. ’’ As the audience applauded, Mr. Trump made a deviation from his prepared text, observing: “I have to say, that as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. ”’ Facing a restive party on the final night of a convention that has been unusually turbulent and divided, Mr. Trump seemed to make headway in galvanizing and unifying at least those Republicans gathered in the hall. The nearly full arena was rapt as Mr. Trump spoke, and when he began discussing illegal immigration, a familiar chant quickly broke out in the arena: “Build the wall, build the wall!” And when he vowed to tell the truth “plainly and honestly,” a delegate cried from the floor: “Bring it, Donald!” Mr. Trump dwelled at length on illegal immigrants and lawless Americans, saying they are as dangerous for the nation’s security as the Islamic State and Syrian refugees. In doing so, Trump advisers said, he sought to win over undecided voters who are sickened by the recent violence against police officers and worried about safety yet are unsure if Mr. Trump has the temperament and abilities to be commander in chief. “I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. ” While nomination speeches are traditionally optimistic and personal, full of hope and revelations that cast candidates in the best possible light for voters, Mr. Trump sounded like a wartime president, using the word “threat” seven times and promising to “defeat the barbarians of ISIS. ” He also recited homicide rates in American cities and the thousands of illegal immigrants with criminal records, promising to control violence at home and abroad. “It is time to show the whole world that America is back — bigger, and better and stronger than ever before,” Mr. Trump said. He was blistering about Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, and her tenure as secretary of state, arguing that her diplomatic strategy in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and other countries had led to civil unrest and political chaos and rendered her unfit to be president. “America is far less safe — and the world is far less stable — than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy,” Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump said Americans had “lived through one international humiliation after another” under President Obama: the Navy sailors “being forced to their knees” by Iranian captors in January the destruction of the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya and Mr. Obama’s decision not to defend his “red line” on Syria. Mrs. Clinton shared the blame, too, he added. “This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness,” Mr. Trump said. In a bid to appeal to Democrats unhappy with their party’s embrace of Mrs. Clinton, he invoked the political message of her chief rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, and suggested that Mr. Sanders shared Republicans’ critique of her record. Mr. Trump’s elder daughter, Ivanka, also sought to reach out to Democrats and moderates, extolling him as a champion of women in the workplace, and a leader who would “take on the bold and worthy fights, who will be unafraid to set lofty goals and relentless in his determination to achieve them. ” This week’s convention, which typically would have been choreographed carefully, was itself a departure from the norm. But if Mr. Trump injected drama and even spontaneity back into the formulaic gathering, he also tested the limits of improvisation over the last week. The operatic quality of the first three days of the convention worried some Republicans. Presidential candidates have two major issues to deal with over the summer, their selection and their convention, and they felt he had bungled both. Mr. Trump chose his running mate haphazardly and then overshadowed the announcement of Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana by indulging in a rambling speech that revived questions about his seriousness. The party staged a convention that reflected just how fractured it is. There were, to be sure, effective attacks on the character and record of Mrs. Clinton, whose unpopularity among modern presidential nominees is exceeded only by Mr. Trump’s. But some of the language spilled into ugliness and catcalls. The party at times seemed unified only around a shared determination to imprison the former secretary of state. But the speeches dedicated to promoting Mr. Trump and the party’s governing vision were hazy and at times collided with the candidate’s own beliefs. Many of the elected officials who spoke extolled a traditional conservative platform that bears little relation to the nationalist agenda on which Mr. Trump is basing his campaign. For example, just hours before Mr. Pence, a committed internationalist, assured delegates and millions of voters that America would defend its allies, Mr. Trump gave an interview in which he balked at defending NATO countries, a policy that has been the cornerstone of the alliance for 70 years. Even as Republicans prepared to leave Cleveland, they were still straining to come to terms with the views and personality of their newly minted nominee. “I’m going to vote for Mike Pence,” said Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah, pausing for effect: “And Donald Trump comes along with the package. ” Candidates who are trailing — as Mr. Trump is, according to national polling averages — must maximize the bump they typically enjoy in the polls after their conventions. Mr. Trump may see his standing improve after he leaves Cleveland on Friday, even though he did not fully seize the opportunity he was afforded after Mrs. Clinton was upbraided by the F. B. I. director over her private email server. In many ways, the convention’s formality was an awkward fit for Mr. Trump, who soared in the primaries by energizing voters at freewheeling rallies with his and frequently entertaining remarks. Instead, for Thursday night, he relied on a teleprompter and a speech heavy with familiar Republican themes like cutting taxes, creating jobs, and pushing for education reforms to give parents more choice in schools for their children. Yet he also made more personal promises as well, like being the ultimate safeguard for the younger generations of Americans. “To every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I’m with you, I will fight for you, and I will win for you,” Mr. Trump said. | 1 |
PARIS — Torrential rains have caused deadly flooding in central and northeastern France this week, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people, some on boats or kayaks, and threatening works of art stored in Paris’s most celebrated museums. A man on horseback was swept away by floodwaters on Thursday and found dead in 30 miles southeast of Paris, the authorities in the administrative department, where the town is located, said. In Germany, heavy rains claimed the lives of nine people. The heavy rains caused the Seine in Paris to rise to 18 feet by Thursday evening, flooding the lower embankments and shutting several roads but causing no significant damage. The level is still far from the record of 1910, however, when the river rose to 26 feet. Nonetheless, the city authorities advised people to stay away from the banks of the river and part of Paris’s commuter train system that runs below ground along the Seine was shut as a preventive measure. The Louvre announced that it would be closed on Friday to move, as a precautionary measure, works of art in areas vulnerable to flooding. The Musée d’Orsay, in a former train station on the Left Bank near the Seine, closed early to put in place a plan that provides for swift evacuation of the museum’s Impressionist masterpieces and other works of art in the event of flooding. The museum will also be closed on Friday. The rainfall also disrupted the French Open, where several tennis matches have been postponed. Officials in France and Germany were bracing for even more rain this week. The Loing River, a tributary of the Seine, has risen to levels not seen since 1910, and the region, which includes Paris, got more rainfall last month than in any May since 1960. President François Hollande said Thursday that the rainfall and floods were “very serious” and linked them to global warming. “When there are climatic phenomena of this seriousness, we must all be aware that we must act globally,” he said. He later added that the government would declare a state of disaster for affected areas, enabling residents and businesses to receive special insurance compensation. About 19, 000 homes in France were still without power on Thursday evening, and the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that an estimated 20, 000 people had been evacuated. Meteorologists attribute the recent deluge to a dip in the jet stream that has trapped air over much of France and Germany, where the air is then warmed by the sun. This occurrence often leads to heat waves, and to thunderstorms as the hot air rises. The recent thunderstorms have been more intense than usual because the hot air rises to encounter colder air in the upper atmosphere. Generally, the greater the difference between the rising hot air and the colder high air, the bigger the storms. Forecasters say there could be a few more days of rain before the air moves on. Speaking from the government’s crisis center in Paris on Thursday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the situation was still “tense” and “difficult” in certain areas. More than 3, 000 people were evacuated from Nemours, about 50 miles south of Paris, after the Loing overflowed, flooding businesses and homes. The surrounding area was on high alert for floods on Thursday, and 12 other departments in the and de Loire regions were on the level of flood alert. In addition to the man found dead in an woman was also found dead Wednesday at her flooded home in a town just south of Nemours. But the cause of her death was unknown on Thursday and the local authorities said an autopsy would be conducted on Friday. Traffic around Orléans, about 75 miles south of Paris, was blocked, and on Tuesday, 217 inmates had to be evacuated from a prison near Orléans. The Château de Chambord, a landmark in the Loire Valley, about 30 miles southwest of Orléans, was surrounded by water. In Germany, the rains have claimed nine lives. On Monday, in the southwestern state of two people, including a firefighter, were sucked into a drainpipe in the town of Schwäbisch Gmünd a man was found dead in a flooded basement garage in Weissbach and a girl, seeking shelter under a railway bridge, was struck by a train and killed in Schorndorf. On Thursday, five people were found dead in the southern German state of Bavaria. They included three women from one family, in a home in the town of Simbach am Inn a man in the same town and an woman in the neighboring village of Julbach. Three others were missing, and the death toll could rise, Michael Emmer, a spokesman for the police in the Lower Bavaria region, told the German news agency DPA. Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the intensity of the flooding had taken officials by surprise. “Within a few minutes, the water level rose about several meters,” he said. Officials said they were preparing for additional storms and strong rains in western and southern Germany. At a news conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed condolences to the families of the victims. In the village of Bad in the state of the Ahr River rose nearly 13 feet to a level that officials said was unprecedented. Several campers in the region sought refuge on the roofs of vehicles and were rescued by helicopter. In the nearby Eifel mountain range, which is popular with tourists and hikers, flooding was also reported. Thousands of homes in Bavaria were without power, officials said. | 1 |
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On Tuesday night, an interview between Fox News host Megyn Kelly and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich got intense in a hurry.
After Kelly referenced Trump as a “sexual predator,” Gingrich fiercely accused her of “using language that’s inflammatory that’s not true,” adding :
“You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy! That’s what I get out of watching you tonight!”
If viewers were fired up by the heated exchange, a tweet sent out by the Trump campaign's social media director Dan Scavino only poured fuel onto that fire: . @MegynKelly made a total fool out of herself tonight- attacking @realDonaldTrump . Watch what happens to her after this election is over. — Dan Scavino Jr. (@DanScavino) October 26, 2016
While it's not explicitly clear what Scavino meant by “watch what happens,” the implications of his comment certainly didn't go unnoticed.
Americans quickly came down on both sides of the issue, with many rushing to Kelly's defense in the face of the “threat”: @DanScavino "Watch what happens to her?" I'm no Kelly fan, but your campaign really isn't learning from the whole "threats vs women" thing. — Dennis Perkins (@DennisPerkins5) October 26, 2016 . @DanScavino She does just fine after the election, I'm guessing. You vanish into obscurity. — Trey Graham (@treygraham) October 26, 2016 @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump You want to be a little more specific about that? Punk. — HarleyPeyton (@HarleyPeyton) October 26, 2016
Still, there were plenty who agreed with Gingrich's suggestion that Kelly was being biased: @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump I used to be a huge fan of Megyn Kelly but no more. Totally unfair to the frmr Speaker. — Scott Schulze (@payshel) October 26, 2016 @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump Send her to CNN. They need more Crooked dishonest journalists! — Trump Revolution (@DonaldTrump_Rev) October 26, 2016 @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump Why surprised?Kelly is a dumb puppet paid millions (thro that book deal?) just to attack DJT.Tragic — Maya Varma (@swargcoming) October 26, 2016
Since early in the 2016 election cycle, there's no doubt that Kelly and the Trump campaign haven't seen eye-to-eye.
More recently, it seemed that tensions had cooled between the GOP nominee and the Fox News host. If Scavino's tweet is any indication, however, that may no longer be the story. | 0 |
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